When you read the Greeks and then realize that you should've learned Ancient Greek to read them...

all translations of the old testament are atrocious and sometimes manipulative
t. read biblical hebrew
also learning koine greek now

>read too much of them to make it worthwhile

Attached: 664.jpg (558x614, 18K)

Are there any Heideggerian translations of the Greeks besides Sachs?

Learned akkdian for the same reason, those translations of hammurabi's laws and those legal documents are quite manipulative, indeed.

Why the fuck can't we trust anything?

Reading NT in Greek is a mindfuck. You can tell which books were written by Greek scholars because it's a compendium of Greek philosophy quotes.

I thought something like a codified text was set up during the period of Pisistratus, about maybe 200 or so years after the Homeric poems. Certainly a sizeable time for variations to creep in, but not a thousand years.

What are you looking for in contemporary translations? I can't tell if you're admitting that you don't know Ancient Greek, in which case, how are you judging the quality?

If you're looking for novel ideas, there are some, but the real benefit of reading certain medievals (especially Maimonides, Al-Farabi, Averroes, Avicenna) is that they make some elements more explicit and sometimes they bother to "dot the 'i's and cross the 't's".

Alter seems to be about as good as we can have at the moment as far as well rounded OT translation goes, without fudging the words or manuscripts for readings. Everett Foxx is very interesting too, though much less consistent, unfortunately. Mainstream translations do tend to be just about garbage though.

>What are you looking for in contemporary translations? I can't tell if you're admitting that you don't know Ancient Greek, in which case, how are you judging the quality?
I've worked with 3 translations of the Metaphysics, two in English and one in German, and they at times wildly differed from each other, which made me look into translation approaches. I'm not sure where I stand exactly, but I like both Schleiermacher's and Heidegger's philosophies on translation, the former for his all-encompassing approach, the latter for his focus on the authenticity of translations relying on respecting Greek philosophy to arise out of a mythological culture. This would probably leave me with Schleiermacher's translation of the Platonic dialogues into German (even though Heidegger considers them to be de-mystified) and Sachs' translation of selected Aristotelian works into English.

What I would be looking for ideally was an approach to the Greek texts which is consistent across the board, translates directly from the original Greek and respects both aspects of Schleiermacher's and Heidegger's approaches above.

I have considered starting to learn Ancient Greek and/or Latin, but I'm not sure it's something I will actually need. My focus in philosophy does not even lie with the Ancients or Medievals and thus learning their languages on my own would be an enormous time sink.

I see. He's not as "Heideggerian" as some people claim, though he takes Heidegger's Aristotle seriously, but have you looked into Joe Sachs's translations of Aristotle? He has just about all of the basic texts down, and he's very consistent about terminology. Hippocrates Apostle also had his own set of Aristotle translations, though a comparison of him and Sachs shows pretty quickly that they disagree about what Aristotle is doing (Sachs takes Aristotle to be a dialectical philosopher, Apostle as a demonstrative one).

Sachs's Plato is nothing special, unfortunately.

A good set of English translations of Plato may be those put down by the "Straussians"; i.e. Allan Bloom, Seth Benardete, Thomas Pangle, James Nichols, Thomas West, and so on. The translations worked on for the Focus Library by Eva Brann are also solid, though probably not as consistent in terminology as you may be looking for.

If you have even an introductory level of Greek under your belt, it can be an enormous help; it's, for the most part, alright if you don't quite know the different forms of verbs or the nuances of how particles get used, since you're not trying to be a classicist, but knowing enough to be able to take a glance at the Greek and see which words are being translated by what term can be incredibly helpful for pinning down what a translator is doing, and making sure they're not fucking around.

Thanks a lot, I guess I will go with Sachs then. Do you know of German or French translations too? I am fluent in both.

>Mainstream translations do tend to be just about garbage though.
Does this mean any popular translation of the Bible part of some tradition is bad?

Just get copies of the Loeb editions.

The Loeb editions are for people who know Ancient Greek and want to compare the translation to the original text, not for having an up-to-date and accurate translation at hand. In fact Loeb is quite outdated when it comes to many classical texts.

I recently tried to find an interesting commentary on Ecclesiastes, especially on the imagery of the golden bowl and silver chord. Most of what I could find seemed to think it referred to the meninges and spinal cord (i.e. the brain and connection to the body) which on the face of it I guess to be a thoroughly modern interpretation.

I guess my real point is to learn Ancient Greek. Shoulda woulda coulda.

Why is Yea Forums this autistic?

OP:
>I want X but without Y. I know it is possible and feasible, so please advice me.

Dozens of spergs:
>You fucking retard. You fucking imbecile. You lazy cumbrain zoomer. How dare you want X without Y. In fact, you shouldn't want X at all. Do Y for 10 years and then come back, or kill yourself. Cretin.

>You fucking retard. You fucking imbecile. You lazy cumbrain zoomer. How dare you want X without Y. In fact, you shouldn't want X at all. Do Y for 10 years and then come back, or kill yourself. Cretin.
I feel like you have projected something onto me that is not myself. The Bible's been brought up, and if you get into serious Bible study you do have to go back to the original, most people who are called to it don't have too much of a problem with this. It's also a very loose idea of having to "learn" the ancient languages involved, you just have to know enough to be able to draw some conclusions from the original.

I was responding to which is a comment chain on Ancient philosophy, not wanting to commit to Bible studies.

For the most part, but there are some exceptions. The RSV and the Jerusalem and New Jerusalem translations are fine. Not amazing, but very solid. But stuff like the NRSV, the NIV, the NJPS, the NKJV, they're not worth bothering with. The NRSV uses too many modern glosses instead of just translating, the NIV translates with their theology already in mind, the JPS tradition looks too much at extrabiblical texts at the expense of translating what's actually written, and the NKJV is an embarrassing mishmash of KJV archaisms and modern euphemisms and phrases, creating an English style that no one has ever spoken, while still not actually offering much in the way of improvements in either the accuracy of their translation or their selection of manuscripts.

I'm the same guy duder. If you want to learn enough ancient language to get a better appreciation of a text it's not that hard, it isn't as black and white as "either don't do it or dedicate a decade of your life to it!"

Rly? How much greek do you need for reading a text side by side? A year? More? I wish there were interlinear editio s of Plato and Aristotle like there are of the NT

Different user, but really basic Greek can hep enormously. Just being able to read the alphabet and being able to recognize certain words so that you can use a dictionary can help. It might be a few months, but you're not trying to be a classicist, right? So you don't need huge swaths of the grammar. Just even practicing transcribing English writing into the Greek alphabet can help.