File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_1998/phillitcrit.9802, message 54


Date: Tue, 3 Feb 1998 11:54:11 -0800
From: goya-AT-uvic.ca (Michael Chase)
Subject: Re: PLC: Enameled In Fire


>Incidentally, if you would like to do some searching yourself, try
>
>http://classics.mit.edu/Search/index.html
>
>        It is a very comprehensive search engine of the classics. I use it all
>the
>time and I am rarely empty-handed at the end.


M.C.: Well, yes; but maybe it ought to be emphasized, for those who may not
know, that this search engine searches through *English translations* of
*some* classical texts. And the translations through which it searches are
not there because they are the best, but because they are public-domain.

        In the matter at hand, we are looking for a text by Plutarch which
omeone has translated as "enameled in fire". Pat's doubts about whether
Plutarch would have used this expression is in a sense anachronistic: of
course he didn't; he wrote in Greek!

        What Greek word might our anonymous translator have chosen to
render by "enameled"? Very hard to say. If, as I've suggested, it was the
neuter plural perfect participle *memigmena*, which literally just means
"mixed", then the translator was guilty of poetic licence at best and
incompetence at worst; but in Emerson's day as now, the world was full of
lousy translators.

        The best solution would be that suggested by G. Downing: find out
what was the widest-used translation of Plutarch in Emerson's day (North,
certainly, for the _Lives_; but did he also do the Moralia_? I seem to
recall there is another translation of excerpts from the Moralia,
introduced by none other than Ralph Waldo....
>

Michael Chase
(goya-AT-uvic.ca)
Dept. of Greek and Roman Studies
U. of Victoria,
Victoria, B.C.
Canada




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