Quote:
Originally Posted by Latinandgreek
Oh yes. I often find that portions of texts that I am reading in Greek or Latin are untranslatable. Holiness, piety and similar concepts are especially hard to translate. For example, Aeneas is often given the epithet pius, but the roman idea of piety differs greatly from a christian idea of piety.
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Let me be a bit contrarian, and maybe to some degree a bit of a devil's advocate.
I am not actually sure that the stuff discussed is an issue of translation
per se. Granted, if I pick up the Euthyphro casually, I may be somewhat misled by the normal contemporary English use of "pious" or "holy" (depending on what translation I will use). But if I immerse myself sufficiently in that text and in other texts from the same milieu, even if I do so entirely in translation, I will start to see what "pious" or "holy" means in that context (especially if all the translation stick to one English word). The issue isn't so much of translation as immersion.
Even if I read the text in the original language, I may well be misled, because how the particular author uses the word may not quite match the ordinary usage at the author's time. In fact, there are times when we will get a better understanding in translation than we would have got had we been native speakers contemporary with the author, because the author may be trying to transform that culture, while we ourselves may be living in a culture that is a fruit of that transformation. Thus, arguably, in a number of (but not all) cases, the English word "virtue" gives a slightly better picture of what Socrates is talking about than the Greek word "arete" would have given to Socrates' contemporaries, because it was Socrates who transformed the word into the deeply moral sense that "virtue" connotes. Our culture is an inheritor to Socrates' transformation of the concept from a generic excellence to something deeply moral. (At the same time, we have somewhat lost the "excellence" part of the meaning.)
Another thought worth bearing in mind is that in the case of most of us, we need to humbly admit that a good translator's knowledge of the language and culture of the text is likely to be better than our own understanding of it, and hence we may get a better understanding by reading the translation than by reading the original. If I were to come up with a different translation of a passage of Aristotle than, say, Irwin and Fine did, there is a pretty good chance that they are right and I am wrong, because they have given many more years of their lives to Greek and Aristotle scholarship than I did.
Though we may well do even better by reading both the translation and the original. :-)