It was a daunting scholarly endeavor. A Professor of Government and a Humanities Research Professor well grounded in the classics both taught Plato’s Republic, but from different perspectives. Their team effort produced what one critic called “the best translation of The Republic or of a Platonic dialogue I know.” Another said “It is brilliant in its translations of the Greek poetry quoted in the course of The Republic.”
The authors of this monumental work were Dr. Richard Sterling and Dr. William Scott, both on the Dartmouth College faculty. It was a marriage of disciplines that worked superbly.
Plato Translation a Quest for Clarity
Their attempt to put into the clearest possible English the thoughts, concepts, theories, metaphors and assertions of Plato’s Republic was a quest for clarity. They also felt that many previous translations were so literal it took students about twice as long to read them. Professor Scott felt The Republic was in danger of falling out of the curriculum because it was too difficult to read.
“The part from my end,” Scott said, “started out with the Greek. I put my own translation together with his text, sentence by sentence, and hoped he wouldn't miss anything in the Greek. Sterling is a very good writer, that's one of the keys. What we wanted to do was to write a Republic that reads as easily in English as it reads in Greek.
One “Translator” Didn’t Know Greek
Professor Scott described his work with Professor Sterling this way: “One of us knew Greek, the other didn't, so already the word translation becomes interesting. Richard Sterling works in the Government department and has been teaching The Republic for years. He looked at many translations that he felt were the best conveyed, the clearest to him. Professor Sterling, with little knowledge of the original Greek, then wrote down what he felt was the clearest prose, what Plato was actually trying to say.”
The result was what other scholars characterized as a new version founded on a sensitively accurate and very readable fusion of form and content, style and substance. One result was that Plato emerged as both thinker and philosophical poet, a duality not found in competing versions.
Book Cover Shows Centuries-Old Fragments of Republic
Reproduced on the book’s cover are the only remaining fragments of the earliest known copy (third century A.D.) of Plato’s Republic (Book VIII). The transparency for the cover art was prepared by directors and staff of Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum.
The authors hold the copyright to the 1985 edition published by W. W. Norton & Co., Inc. (New York and London). There are other editions of the work, including a 1996 paperback edition, also published by Norton. The book continues to have fairly high sales.
SOURCE: Writer Rosemary Bachelor, who knew Richard Sterling, wrote a tribute to him this week. Dr. Sterling, 86, died January 31, 2009. A major source for this article was an interview of Prof. Scott which appeared in a 1996 issue of The Dartmouth Review.
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