| Summary: | This paper is an investigation into the role of translation as a medium in the transmission of Platonic thought. My approach is descriptive, not evaluative: I shall not attempt to define a standard or ideal of form, function and scope of translation in this particular field of application. Rather, I shall present individual instances of Plato’s philosophy in translation and draw from them conclusions with regard to the translators’ wider philosophical framework, agenda and methodology. First I shall introduce the text that will be the object of my examination, Plato’s Timaeus 29b2−d3, by drawing attention to some of its key interpretative issues. In Part Two of my investigation, an initial brief look at a modern translation of the passage will highlight the manner in which points of contention at stake in our contemporary Platonic scholarship are reflected in some of the texts available to modern students. I shall then offer a detailed analysis of Cicero’s translation of the passage, composed in the mid-first century BC, followed by the translation of the same text by the commentator and translator Calcidius, who wrote in the latter half of the fourth century AD. In demonstrating that all three versions of Tim. 29b2−d3 are individual witnesses to their authors’ contemporary Platonism, with each text betraying the specific influences of its translator’s philosophical and intellectual mindset, I aim to make a case for translation as a device that must be regarded not as an impartial and merely functional instrument of knowledge transmission, but as a contribution to, and an interpretation, of its own accord, of the body of knowledge it is intended to communicate.
|
|---|
