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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: 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
concrete English, or vice versa, and he ought not to force upon one
language the character of another. In some cases, where the order is
confused, the expression feeble, the emphasis misplaced, or the sense
somewhat faulty, he will not strive in his rendering to reproduce these
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