The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, with a new foreword by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Princeton University Press, £35
For a university student in the 1980s, The Collected Dialogues of Plato edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns and published by Princeton University Press (first in 1961) was a treasured possession. The volume brought together readable English translations of essentially all of Plato’s writings: the genuine dialogues, a few doubtful ones, and the Letters – in all, the work of 14 translators from Benjamin Jowett in the 1870s to Hugh Tredennick (1954). It had to be handled with care because its India paper was thin enough for a careless turn of the page to tear it. The volume now reappears in a new design, with sturdier paper (hence a thicker book), semi-hard covers, and a brief foreword by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein; inside, the pages are those of 1961, reproduced from the original typesetting.
Plato was a marvellous and elegant stylist, and his translators must try to do justice to his artistry. How does one set about translating a Platonic dialogue? The Republic begins with four words: katebēn chthes eis Peiraia. Idiomatic English might say ‘Yesterday I went down to the Piraeus.’ Ancient sources report that a tablet was found among Plato’s effects on which these words had been written out in several different orders. Plato’s final choice puts katebēn (‘I went down’) first.
The verb evokes katabasis, the descent to the Underworld from which an initiate into the Mysteries returns with secret knowledge. The Republic sets out to do just that: the philosopher who has left the Cave is told that he must ‘go down’ again, and the tale of Er brings back a report from the land of the dead. George Grube’s version (revised by CDC Reeve) in John Cooper’s rival one-volume Complete Works (1997) runs: ‘I went down to the Piraeus yesterday.’ Paul Shorey, whose translation is used here, is scrupulous as regards word order: ‘I went down yesterday to the Piraeus’ (only ‘the Piraeus’ sounds perhaps old-fashioned – Plato has no article, and another translator might well drop it).
There is much to consider, then, in translating just four simple words. In this case nothing is lost by staying close to the Greek. More often the translator must reshape, expand, or even paraphrase to produce fluent English. How far may a translator stray? Every translation bears the stamp of its period and of its translator’s taste. Many of the versions Hamilton and Cairns chose were already decades old in 1961, and their idiom often looks back to the Victorians, not least because the most celebrated of Victorian Platonists, Benjamin Jowett, contributes seven of them (four more than any other translator).
A few lines after the opening of the Republic, Socrates remarks on the festival procession (in Shorey’s translation): ‘I thought the procession of the citizens very fine, but it was no better than the show made by the marching of the Thracian contingent.’ Shorey makes the Athenian procession the subject of both clauses. Grube renders epichōrioi more accurately as ‘local residents’, loosens the syntax, and keeps the Thracian procession as the subject of his second clause: ‘I thought the procession of the local residents was a fine one and that the one conducted by the Thracians was no less outstanding.’ Both translators call the procession ‘fine’ (kalē, the same adjective as to kalon in the Symposium), but today we might be happier with ‘splendid’, ‘impressive’, or even ‘a great show’.
The challenge is steep in the Symposium, which I have recently been translating for publication. Its speeches are a gallery of voices, and Michael Joyce’s exuberant version in this volume (dating from 1935) catches them well. Joyce tends to be expansive, as when the narrator Apollodorus near the start tells Glaucon what his life was like before he fell under Socrates’ spell: ‘Before that I used to go dashing about all over the place, firmly convinced that I was leading a full and interesting life, when I was really as wretched as could be – much the same as you, for instance, for I know philosophy’s the last thing you’d spend your time on.’ In this passage, Plato’s original oiomenos ti poiein, ‘thinking I was achieving something’, has grown into ‘firmly convinced that I was leading a full and interesting life’. While the Greek has the narrator thinking that he himself should be ‘doing anything rather than philosophy’, Glaucon’s response, ‘Don’t have a go at me!’, shows that he takes it as a jibe. Joyce’s emphatic you makes this explicit, not unreasonably, and it is not necessarily a worse rendering than my own more concise version: ‘Up until then I was running around aimlessly, imagining that I was living a productive life. But in fact I was as pathetic as you can get – a bit like you are now, Glaucon – because I imagined that philosophy was the last thing I needed.’
Conversational passages in Plato leave a translator room for manoeuvre. The technical passages and arguments allow much less. These can turn on particular words or series of propositions, and the translator must stay close to them if their logic is to survive. When Diotima in the Symposium says that love is tokos en kalōi, ‘giving birth in beauty’, the strange phrase binds physical procreation to the intellectual offspring of poets, lawgivers and philosophers. The word kalon should be rendered as recognisably the same term, as the ascent moves from beautiful bodies to beautiful souls, laws and knowledge, and finally to Beauty itself. A version that alternates ‘beautiful’, ‘fine’ and ‘noble’ for elegance may read more easily, but at the expense of breaking the thread of argument.
Hamilton and Cairns’ selection drew on some of the best Platonists of the 20th century; the prefatory notes are still a useful guide, and the remarkably full index lets the reader follow a name, theme, or term from one dialogue to another. The volume is in some respects a period piece, representing a Plato to be enjoyed by the English-speaking general reader in the decades before 1961. In many of the versions, hearing these voices can be a pleasure in itself. This reissue is a reminder that earlier attempts to render Plato have not lost their value; the treasury of Platonic thought can now be enjoyed, in one handy volume, by a new generation of English-language readers.
