Daily Inspiration Quote by Gilbert Murray

Murray is quietly detonating a fantasy every reader of classics has entertained: that translation can be a kind of carbon copy. He grants the easy cases first. When languages line up neatly word-for-word, you can trail the original closely enough to mimic its gait. Then comes the pivot: Aristotle. The problem is not just specialized vocabulary or lost idioms; it is that Aristotle's thinking is welded to the grain of his Greek. His prose is famously compressed, technical, and architectonic, built to do philosophy in real time. Render it into "normal English" and you don't merely swap terms, you sand down the very friction that produces meaning.

The phrase "normal English" is doing extra work. Murray is signaling a choice translators must make: either you honor the strangeness (and risk sounding unnatural, even unreadable) or you domesticate the text (and risk producing a fluent counterfeit). The subtext is a critique of smoothness as a cultural value. Readability becomes a kind of betrayal when the author’s style is part of the argument.

Context matters: Murray belonged to a generation of elite classicists who acted as cultural mediators between antiquity and modern public life. As a diplomat in the broad sense - someone translating civilizations, not just sentences - he’s wary of the way English can effortlessly absorb other voices and, in doing so, quietly imperialize them. Aristotle, he implies, resists assimilation. Any translation that feels fully at home is, by that comfort, already suspicious.