Cicero on Translating Demosthenes
[Tully,] who has translated the Protagoras of Plato, the Œconomicus of Xenophon, and the two beautiful orations which Æschines and Demosthenes delivered one against the other … has spoken as follows in a prologue prefixed to the orations. ”I have thought it right to embrace a labour which though not necessary for myself will prove useful to those who study. I have translated the noblest speeches of the two most eloquent of the Attic orators, the speeches which Æschines and Demosthenes delivered one against the other; but I have rendered them not as a translator but as an orator, keeping the sense but altering the form by adapting both the metaphors and the words to suit our own idiom. I have not deemed it necessary to render word for word but I have reproduced the general style and emphasis. I have not supposed myself bound to pay the words out one by one to the reader but only to give him an equivalent in value.” Again at the close of his task he says, “I shall be well satisfied if my rendering is found, as I trust it will be, true to this standard. In making it I have utilized all the excellences of the originals, I mean the sentiments, the forms of expression and the arrangement of the topics, while I have followed the actual wording only so far as I could do so without offending our notions of taste. If all that I have written is not to be found in the Greek, I have at any rate striven to make it correspond with it.[1]
- ^1. Jerome. Letter LVII. To Pammachius on the Best Method of Translating.. NPNF 2/6:114. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Accessed February 23, 2024. https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206/npnf206.v.LVII.html