Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Moral Discourses: Enchiridion and Fragments
I hesitated for some time, whether to call this book simply a revision of Elizabeth Carter's translation, or a new one based on hers. The latter alternative was finally chosen, less in order to claim for myself any credit of hers, than to save her from sharing any dis credit of mine. The enterprise was begun simply as a revision. But to revise any translation made a century ago, is like underrunning a telegraphic ca ble: one may inspect a good deal of it, and find but tri?ing repairs needful; and then one may come to a point where a wholly new piece must go in. These substitutions multiplied so rapidly, and even where the changes were slight, they touched words and phrases so vita1, - that the name I have chosen is really the least dishonest that could be given. After all, it shows the thoroughness of Elizabeth Carter'swork, that this process of underrunning was practi cable at all. With the loose, dashing, piquant school of translators who preceded her in that century, as l'estrange and Collier, such an attempt would have been absurdity. They are very racy reading, - in deed, a capital study for coarse, colloquial English, but there is no foundation of accuracy in them. Yet the style of Epictetus has a concise and even delicate precision which no language but Greek could per haps attain; and to do justice to this without loss of popular intelligibility requires all Elizabeth Car ter's faithfulness, combined with an amount of purely literary effort which she did not always make. She apologizes, in her letters, for the uncouthness, in many places, of a version pretty strictly literal. If she erred on this side, perhaps I have erred in allowing myself a terminology, not more diffuse than hers, but more pliant and varied. But after all, unless a new English version is to be popularized, there seems no use in making it at all.
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