Protagoras and Meno

I read this while taking Plato, though it also came up in Aristotle. (For obvious reasons...) I liked it, mostly because it was clear, where other translations use old-fashioned or out-of-date language to try and pretend Plato is more complex than he really is. Don't get me wrong, Plato is certainly interesting to read, as is this book, but sometimes people get caught up in the history and ignore the philosophy. As a side note, I wanted to learn more about the translator, and found out he actually wrote about translating Greek, and why he chose what he did. You can check it out on his website, just do a Google search for Adam Beresford. He has various articles on there, but I've only read a few of them. (I was there for the translation stuff...)

We can all understand the concept of translating a complicated work into one which is slightly more accessible to the general public. This latest incarnation, however, suggests the good people at penguin see the general public as being rather stupid. This version of Protagoras and Meno is so horribly oversimplified as to provide practically no joy of experience, no purpose and, certainly, no value to the reader. This savaged, diluted, shadowy reflection of P & M is, in fact, kind of an achievement in the growing realm of demographic-pandering, in that, each work possessed, prior to this edition, a tidy order of reason which has since been extricated from the pages. My advice to anyone interested in enjoying P & M is to find an older, used book. my advice to penguin is to stop doing this. no one wants to hear a Wagnerian opera adapted for the kazoo. See, virtue can be taught. : ) note: The rating should be 2 stars. The star rating pulldown menu is not showing up in my browser.

Adam Beresford's wonderful new translation of these two Platonic dialogues from the middle period, Protagoras and Meno, struck me, because they captured better than any other translations I've ever read of any other dialogues, the campiness that is so essential to Plato's witty irony, and so often overlooked. I never realized how essential these asides were to his philosophy until I read Beresford's translation. Furthermore, the modern translation, colloquial and clear (and accurate!) makes difficult philosophical arguments - as for example, what makes a man good - easier to follow than translations past. Past translations have obfuscated some of these arguments and even at times rendered them unintelligible. Beresford's work clears up many of these problems.

I am not a philosopher but who says only philosophers can read Plato's texts and come out with an understanding of what he is up to? Thanks to Adam Beresford's translation of the Protagoras and Meno, I can ask this question now. I've tried reading stilted translations of Plato's texts and they have felt like breaking rocks. I've wondered of those translations if they are in English at all. Reading Beresford's translation was a joy to my imagination and mind. I can now ask myself what being good is and find a way to engage this concept in my own life in a way that I couldn't when being good is translated in many texts as a virtue. In a way Beresford has taken philosophy back to where it belongs, to the butcher, farmer, storekeeper, beekeeper, taxi driver and to an African woman like me. I do not want to sound like his translation is only aimed at the common person. His translation is layered and is apt to be read both by experts in the academy and people like me. This is a new vision, a new way to translate Plato and to bring it back to where Socrates would recognize, to the common person. L.T.

If Meno's slave boy, if a slave is capable of discovering the same knowledge about geometry and to discover and apply the most profound ideas that can ever discovered, as Meno's slave demonstrates is able to do, what does that say about what a slave is? What does that, if true, demonstrate about human beings? I not only recommend this but wanted to pose that question too. I recommend the "Meno" dialogue as well as Frederick Douglass's 3 Autobiographies.