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Comment by lordleft | Hacker News Reader

Not to minimize the significance of this but prohibiting a portion of a reading is like slapping a "parental warning" on a Rap CD in the 90s -- if I was an undergrad, I'd only want to read those excerpts more.

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The real barrier to students reading Plato has historically (and correctly) been the dismal quality of translations available. I always hated reading plato because the translations available to me were significantly more concerned with carrying into the modern day the wonky syntax and sentence structure of ancient Greek philosophical writing, and less concerned with translating the underlying ideas into language understandable by a 19 year-old engineering major who can barely spell their own name.

I think that it would be easier to get younger people to study Quenya to be able to read fragments of Tolkien in the "original" than it would be to somehow get them to learn to read classical Greek. But it's not that hard to learn to just read Attic and Homeric Greek, and then there's a lifetime of really great stuff that opens up for one to enjoy.

>it's not that hard to learn to just read Attic and Homeric Greek

I studied Attic, Koine, and Homeric, as well as a few other dialects for 10 years through college until I left my PhD program in Classics. Learning Greek was _very_ hard and even after that time I still had many gaps.

It's not all-or-nothing, though, and free sources like Attikos provide word definitions at a tap. Since I'm old, I also have a shelf of Loebs, and have no shame about skimming the dull bits by reading the trots.

You act as if there are not companion or derivative works ad-nauseam. The barrier is hermeneutic, not grammatical, which is a fundamental constraint on shared meaning. Thus the "real barrier" is innate and your particular fixation only serves artificial ones. But please do add more than a complaint to our canon of meaning, I do not mean to devalue the act you are advocating, just the notion of neglect in this respect.

I mean to say that the only time I've ever needed to diagram a sentence to figure out what was being said was while taking Philosophy 1010, because the cheapest translations available of e.g. The Republic was a bit too opaque for me.

There's certainly a lot to be said about the manifold interpretations of Platonic Idealism; what I'm saying is that when we've historically introduced new philosophy students to things like Jowett's translations ("But tell me, Zeno, do you not further think that there is an idea of likeness in itself, and another idea of unlikeness, which is the opposite of likeness, and that in these two, you and I and all other things to which we apply the term many, participate-things which participate in likeness become in that degree and manner like; and so far as they participate in unlikeness become in that degree unlike, or both like and unlike in the degree in which they participate in both?"), there's also a grammatical issue. Yes, I can deconstruct that and reassemble it in more colloquial terms. The problem is that for a lot of students, they don't develop interest enough to engage in the deconstruction until after they've gone through the arduous process of reading that and thinking "WTF?!"

I’m speaking from my own informal reading of the Cooper edition, which I genuinely enjoyed for its prose. Even so, it took me years to work through the whole thing, and I trace my difficulty quite easily to gaps in my earlier education and reading habits.

I’m not convinced that better translations are doing much to fix the deeper issue in most readers: the lack of broad exposure to the Western canon which seems to cultivate a real preference for rigor over comfort.

I had only the Jowett translation and probably gave up on passages like that. What got my attention was diagramming. I diagrammed Koine Greek sentences every time in assignments with Apostle Paul or Luke. Greek is intensely inflected (different word endings for subject, object, for starters) A lot of meaning is packed in which makes word order very flexible.

I want to go try some Plato in Greek. Do you have the reference for that passage? (Thankfully I got the unabridged Liddell and Scott lexicon which encompasses Attic not just New Testament words so I’ve been able to read Homer.)

I read an excellent parallel Greek and English translation when I was a kid, probably the one in the Loeb Classical Library.

They probably had this attitude, but I didn't find it objectionable at all, and I'm not a native English speaker. If a 19-year old engineering student can't read that, even in his own language, what's the point? The guy's a bore.

I think it's probably better to just read them having picked them off a bookshelf than in a class though.

Tell me about a complicated man. That's a translation!

The difference is people wanted to listen to Eminem or whatever because it's enjoyable, trendy music that's played on the radio and all their friends were listening to.

Plato is not exactly burning up the airwaves right now. Most likely the only exposure most people will have to this work (or any of the libraries of work that's been banned in this manner) would be at college, assigned to them for a class.

I think the point was more Streisand Effect than commentary on the popularity.

The undergrads won't hear about it. The material will just silently not be on the syllabus and they'll never know. In this case the interference has broken containment, but this won't be the norm.

Similar vein: reading in general is down, overall. Especially among young people. "Banning" a book isn't affecting anyone, it just gets a bunch of people riled up on two political tribes.

Now, if they actually banned a book, like "you will go to jail for having this" I would be concerned.

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