As noted as far back as 2016, I've been ruminating for years about how to render certain key terms of Aristotle's philosophy from ancient Greek into English. To date, the only outcome has been a glossary that I update regularly as I add more definitions and polish the existing ones. Recently I lighted upon a constructive way to put some of these renderings to the test: by translating a brief Aristotelian work whose title is usually presented as On Virtues and Vices.
Although most scholars consider this work to be spurious - at best written by an Aristotelian but not by Aristotle himself - in 2013 Peter L.P. Simpson published a paper making a plausible case that the work was a kind of handout used during Aristotle's lecture courses, since it matches the description of something cited in the Eudemian Ethics. Duly encouraged, I decided to attempt a translation, which I ended up titling On Thrivings and Failings of Character.
The process was interesting and beneficial, at least for me - similar in some ways to running a unit test in computer programming. Just as writing is a form of thinking, so also is translating. If we envision a big field containing a whole lot of meaning, no one word can cover the entire field; that's one reason why in English we have so many synonyms. Things get even more interesting as you think through the overlapping ways that a word in ancient Greek covers part of the ground while a word in modern English covers some but not all of the very same ground. (And that's even leaving aside trying to honor the style and feeling of the original, as I've essayed when translating poems by the likes of Sappho and Horace, with varying levels of success.)
A notorious example is the ancient Greek word sōphrosunē / σωφροσύνη, which was sort of a catch-all concept in classical philosophy and culture, with meanings as diverse as moderation, temperance, self-control, self-knowledge, soundness of mind, balance, reasonableness, wisdom, prudence, virtue, even chastity. Classicist Helen North wrote a whole book about this one word! (For the record, I've settled on rendering σωφροσύνη as 'moderation'.)
Another factor I keep firmly in mind is the great cultural chasm between classical Athens and modern America. Although people often say that ancient Greece was the fountainhead of democracy and Western culture, it's also true that "the past is a foreign country", as David Lowenthal put it. For us, words like 'virtue' and 'soul' are weighted down with Christian theology, and we don't even use words like 'vice' and 'evil' anymore because that would be too judgmental. Thus my creativity with thrivings and failings instead of virtues and vices.
Translating this short piece (it's less than 2000 words in English) helped me work out some bugs in my glossary and better understand Aristotle's viewpoint, so I might try my hand at passages that include key concepts I didn't hit this time around, from works of Aristotle's like the Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, and his early and mostly lost dialogue Protrepticus. If I do so, I'll definitely report on the results.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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