中譯本前言(劉小楓)
序
引子
第一部分 相遇
第一章 芝加哥大學(1948一1952，1954—1955)
第二章 雅典、羅馬和佛羅倫薩(1952—1954)
第三章 聖約翰大學(1955—1957)
第四章 哈佛(1957—1960)
第五章 布蘭代斯、紐約大學和新學院(：1960—2001)
第二部分 反思
第六章 從模式到活力
第七章 “不確定二分組合”
第八章 愛欲與城邦
第九章 哲學與科學
第十章 基督教與古羅馬作家
原文索引 本書採取將原書索引複印 內文寫頁碼之方式
翻譯問題
on Page 8 : "... 5-ei-6: We used to go to Hannover in the summer. My mother and father were given cubicles in the library. A college student would take care of my brother and me. One of them ..."
cubicles 當然不是 "有間小臥室" (p.7) 而是路父母在圖書館各有間小研究室
| . | on Page 52: | | "... We finally got to meet Eliot at a party the Neffs had. Did I ever tell you about the apple strudel parties? ..." | | 2. | on Page 53: | | "... But he was so drunk at the apple strudel party that he-who usually kept his mouth shut-said, "Sir, Spain has saved America three times" And he began to keel ..." |
apple strudel 翻譯成"蘋果點心 " ( p.59)可能不知所云 參考
一處編輯錯誤 主角發言 被當成內文
榮休 /退休(中間) 教授
p.272 注之"欽定教授"頗怪
原來是 Regius
... In 1841 he was named Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. In addition to several volumes of sermons, he wrote a three-volume History of Rome (1838 – 43). He was the father of Matthew Arnold and grandfather of the novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward (1851 – 1920)....
這日本這樣翻譯
Regius professor 〔英〕 欽定講座担当教授.
不過 也許不是"欽定"的
Regius professor, an incumbent of a professorship founded by royal bounty, as in an English university.
****
SHELF LIFE; A Classicist's Starting Point: Putting Aside Interpretations By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN Published: February 16, 2002 Confessions of ignorance are not usually in a critic's best interest. But in this case, perhaps, an exception can be made. Ignorance, after all, is now common when confronting Greek literature. Beginning with ignorance is also an approach recommended by many of these demanding essays by Seth Benardete, a classicist at New York University, who died to relatively little notice in November. Because of his difficult and idiosyncratic interpretations, that notice is not likely to expand beyond a small group of philosophers, political scientists and classicists. Yet testimonials are unqualified. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, the respected French historian, has proclaimed of Benardete, ''I have long believed that he deserves glory -- that of the heroes of Homer, to be precise.'' Harvey Mansfield, a political scientist at Harvard, said Benardete was ''the most learned man alive and, I venture to assert, the deepest thinker as well.'' According to several anecdotes, T. S. Eliot heaped praise on his brilliance. At a memorial program at New York University earlier this month, encomiums for the man -- who spent his career writing translations and commentary on Plato, a book on ''The Odyssey'' (''The Bow and the Lyre'') and essays on Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristotle -- were offered by philosophers and classicists, including Ronna Burger of Tulane University and Michael Davis of Sarah Lawrence College, both of whom edited the current collection. But why the broad devotion to so specialized a scholar? Why the praise for a writer whose gnomic vocabulary about gnomic material uses phrases like ''eidetic analysis'' and ''indeterminate dyad''? ''The Argument of the Action'' provides some answers by collecting essays written throughout Benardete's career. They are so intimidating in their minute attention to Greek tragedies and Platonic dialogues that they can barely be read without following the works themselves (only some of which I have studied). The essays ornately weave allusions, analyses and images, engaging in close textual analysis while venturing unsettling hypotheses. The first step, Benardete stressed, is indeed to approach the works as a beginner, to read, say, ''The Republic'' or ''Oedipus Tyrannus'' free from millennia of interpretations. At first, the arguments and plots might seem fairly transparent. Sophocles' most famous Oedipus play, for example, has long been regarded as a story about a man who unknowingly kills his father, the king of Thebes, and marries his mother. When he discovers the truth, he blinds himself. Such are the tragic consequences of desire and fate. Such plays have, of course, been analyzed for their literary structure. But Benardete goes further. He looks not for unity but for peculiarity. Why does the queen apparently marry Oedipus before she knows about her husband's death? Why does the witness to Oedipus' crime contradict the known facts? We think we understand the action, but the closer we look the less seems clear. For Benardete the play forces the reader to blunder into its familiar world as unknowingly as Oedipus does in his, to engage in a detailed inquiry and to discover the unexpected. Consider, he suggests, the great riddle of the Sphinx that Oedipus must solve to stop the plague that has come to Thebes: what walks on four legs in the morning, on two at midday and on three in the evening? Oedipus' answer is man, who first crawls as a baby, then walks upright and in old age uses a cane. That answer would seem to show him a master of the human. But Oedipus is more like its victim. The problem in Benardete's view is that he sees only the general not the particular. His notion of the human is outlined by the Sphinx's riddle. All variation and difference is lost; even Oedipus himself, partially lame, does not fit the Sphinx's pattern. Yet he persists in focusing purely on the abstract. He becomes a tyrant, seeking to establish public order as if it could be created by formula. The play, Benardete argues, is about tragic consequences of political blindness. In such a reading the surface is closely examined to reveal unexpected depths. This was also the approach of Benardete's mentor at the University of Chicago, Leo Strauss, a charismatic scholar. Students of Strauss, including Benardete, have had an almost cultic relationship to him. Many have also become influential conservative intellectuals -- most famously, the late Allan Bloom, author of ''The Closing of the American Mind.'' Strauss has, in fact, been attacked for conservativism: his unmitigated elitism and supposed antidemocratic temperament, which some say included the suggestion that Nazism was a product of the Enlightenment. But this view of the Nazis -- and of Soviet Communism -- was not as bizarre as it might seem. It was held by Isaiah Berlin as well, because the ideals of the Enlightenment included the belief that reason had utopian powers and that humanity could be reconstructed under its guidance. That belief in the malleability of the human, Berlin argued, ended up leading to totalitarianism. Strauss's dismissal of the reasoned perfectibility of society did not, as many have claimed, lead to a belief that the quest for justice should not be attempted. It did mean that any attempt to attain justice could only approach its goal by taking into account the ambiguities, unpredictability and variability of humanity. Strauss stressed the inherent difficulty of the project, not the need for its abandonment; that was one reason for his elitism. This view does not seem far from Benardete's. Oedipus, again, is a political leader who mistakenly believes that justice can be attained and suffering relieved by the narrow application of reason and will alone. The word sphinx means binder or constrictor, Benardete argues, which is just what such a narrow view of the human will do: bind rather than liberate. That was Benardete's response to the Sphinx's riddle.
THE ARGUMENT OF THE ACTION
Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy
By Seth Benardete
434 pages. University of Chicago Press. $39.
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