Category: Translation
We’re excited that you’ve joined the conversation! At HMU, we want to continue the great authors’ conversations in a contemporary context, and this blog will help us do that. We look back to Aristotle and the early philosophers who used reason and discourse to gain wisdom and now we endeavor to do the same every day.
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October 20, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. George Bull translated the Penguin Classics version of Machiavelli’s The Prince (1999). In the introductory materials, Bull notes some of the difficulties of translating Machiavelli’s language. I find his comments particularly enlightening since they also address the problematic nature of virtue. Machiavelli clearly …
May 19, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. I remember my first experience with Chaucer. At the age of fifteen or sixteen, I tried reading his stories in the original Middle English and was very disoriented. Of course, I had a lot of footnotes to rely on, but these also overwhelmed …
November 4, 2022 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. For the October Quarterly Discussion, we read Plutarch’s “Coriolanus” and a speech by David McCullough titled “Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are.” I was not really sure if this combination would work because of the great differences between the two pieces. Plutarch’s …
September 30, 2022 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Some of the primary texts that we study at Harrison Middleton University date back to the Roman Empire. Obviously we use popular translations of these texts, but it is always a worthy exercise to look at the primary texts. Much information can be …
September 9, 2022 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Like many American children, I grew up with the rhymes of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I still remember snippets of “Paul Revere’s Ride”: “[T]hrough the gloom and the light,/ The fate of a nation was riding that night;/ And the spark struck out by …
July 29, 2022 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s blog. As I understand it, more than two hundred and fifty translations of the Tao te Ching exist. Looking for a chance to study language, poetry, and translation, I decided to compare a handful of versions of the Tao. Though there are a number …
June 18, 2021 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Have you ever attempted to restate another person’s idea in your own words? Often, we listen to a discussion and get the gist, but when asked to recreate the argument, we stumble. At Harrison Middleton University, listening is key. We try to identify …
April 9, 2021 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Today’s post is a brief look at translation and word choice in Thucydides. Both small sections from The History of the Peloponnesian War, Book IV, Chapter XII, furnish a glimpse of the author’s opinion. Though Thucydides set out to write a history of …
March 19, 2021 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Comparing translations often leads to interesting results. Last year, I read Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice in the Great Books of the Western World, which uses H. T. Lowe-Porter’s translation (published in 1928). This year, I read Stanley Applebaum’s translation from the Dover …
May 15, 2020 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Recently, I found myself struggling with the question: How might Chaucer or Dante’s works demonstrate the way that “language is myth,” as Claude Lévi-Strauss asserts in Structural Anthropology (vol 58: 475)? First I began to examine what Lévi-Strauss means by language. He separates …
