| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: made of the language from which the translation is taken, consistently with
the first requirement of all, that it be English. Further, the translation
being English, it should also be perfectly intelligible in itself without
reference to the Greek, the English being really the more lucid and exact
of the two languages. In some respects it may be maintained that ordinary
English writing, such as the newspaper article, is superior to Plato: at
any rate it is couched in language which is very rarely obscure. On the
other hand, the greatest writers of Greece, Thucydides, Plato, Aeschylus,
Sophocles, Pindar, Demosthenes, are generally those which are found to be
most difficult and to diverge most widely from the English idiom. The
translator will often have to convert the more abstract Greek into the more
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: participate?
Yes.
Then being is distributed over the whole multitude of things, and nothing
that is, however small or however great, is devoid of it? And, indeed, the
very supposition of this is absurd, for how can that which is, be devoid of
being?
In no way.
And it is divided into the greatest and into the smallest, and into being
of all sizes, and is broken up more than all things; the divisions of it
have no limit.
True.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Domestic Peace by Honore de Balzac: Countess was still absorbed in compassion at the sight of Soulanges,
for she still loved him truly enough to wish to restore him to
happiness, and was promising herself in her own mind that she would
exert the irresistible power her charms still had over him to make him
return to his wife.
"Oh! I will talk to him!" said she to Madame de Lansac.
"Do nothing of the kind, my dear!" cried the old lady, as she went
back to her armchair. "Choose a good husband, and shut your door to my
nephew. Believe me, my child, a wife cannot accept her husband's heart
as the gift of another woman; she is a hundred times happier in the
belief that she has reconquered it. By bringing my niece here I
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