When I first read Alan Bloom’s preface to his translation of Plato’s Republic a number of years ago, I thought immediately about the implications with respect to Bible translation.
Fred Sanders picks up on that theme in a recent post. An excerpt:
Why would you take a fascinating, sophisticated, bizarrely foreign, ancient text like the Republic, and turn it into “the kind of sentence one finds in newspaper editorials?” The answer, Bloom thinks, is that translators are tempted to do that kind of thing to render Plato immediately accessible to the contemporary mind. Their goal is apparently to clear out all the obstacles to understanding, and they take Plato’s unique vocabulary to be a mass of obstacles strewn in the pathway. But Bloom knows better: those are not obstacles, those are the stepping stones.
And here’s a Bloom thought-provoker: “Is it not conceivable that the Republic is a book meant for people who are going to read widely in it, and that it would be unfair to cheat them for the sake of the subjective satisfaction of those who pick out sentences aimlessly?”
His conclusion:
Bloom was enough of a purist about what he was doing with Plato, that it seems to me that Bible translators and readers could learn a thing or two from his Republic about how to handle a text that is in every way above you.
You can read the whole thing here.