PACE - the most elaborate project on Josephus, online and for free

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mlinssen
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PACE - the most elaborate project on Josephus, online and for free

Post by mlinssen »

http://pace.hypervisions.it/york/york/index.htm

Steve Mason started this project in Canada and moved it to the University of Groningen, along with himself

These days it is hosted in Italy, and it is more than marvelous for anyone interested in Josephus

From the Preface to the Commentary:

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A few words about the translation are now in order.
Granted that every translation is an interpretation, one can still imagine a spectrum of options, most obviously on the spectrum of fidelity to the source over against easy readability in the target language. Cases can easily be made for both extremes, and for each interim stop, in that spectrum. “Accuracy” is not a single or stable criterion in such choices, for one might gain precision in conveying a single word, form, or phrase at the cost of accurately conveying the sentence, or in faithfully representing the parts of a 200-word sentence by losing the English reader along the way. Homer’s epic poems provide a famous example of such problems. Does one try to render Homer’s dactylic hexameter in English because that is how he wrote, at the cost of understanding the sense in English, or use a different meter, or use prose and focus on choosing the best words? The translator must make choices.
In our case, our choices were largely made by the needs of the commentary. If we were preparing a stand-alone translation for independent reading, we would probably have made different choices. In that case the translation would have needed to include a good deal of implicit commentary. We would have settled many basic problems in the translation, for example by amplifying cryptic terms, adding implied phrases, and replacing pronouns with names. Since the translation is here to serve the commentary, however, we can and should leave many problems in translation more visible to the reader. And since the commentary is on Josephus’ particular Greek words and phrases, it seemed necessary to reflect the Greek as closely as possible. We can tolerate less clarity in our translation, in other words, because we intend it to be an aid to the commentary.
We happily confess our admiration for the Loeb translation of Josephus, which has been the standard for some time: begun by Henry St. John Thackeray in the 1920s and completed in 1965 by our colleague in the Brill Project, Louis H. Feldman (volume 3: Antiquities 1-4). Our effort to provide a new translation implies no criticism of the Loeb. Its older sections of it often sound quaint now, but it has held up well and is often brilliant. Although it is far superior to either the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century translations or the more modern paraphrases, it does not suit the needs of a commentator. Because it is a freestanding translation, it makes idiomatic English the highest virtue. This means rendering Greek terms that Josephus uses frequently or even formulaically by different English equivalents, for the sake of variety. And the Loeb often supplies explanatory items to enhance clarity and narrative flow. It collapses two or more Greek clauses into a single English clause. It rearranges the parts of speech with considerable freedom. And it tends to homogenize Josephus’ changing style over the corpus to a single, elevated English level. Since we have undertaken to annotate his words and phrases, obviously we need a different sort of foundation. Our goal has been to render Greek terms with as much consistency as the context will allow, at least indicating a family resemblance, to reflect the Greek parts of speech, letting adjectives be adjectives and participles be participles, to preserve Josephus’ phrases and clauses intact, and to reflect something of the particular stylistic level and tone in each section.
Even a determined literalness must, however, yield to the commandment of readability. Cases in which we have relinquished any effort to represent the Greek include Josephus’ many sentences comprising a series of aorist-participle clauses. We have dealt quite freely with such clauses, by breaking a series of clauses into separate sentences and also by using a variety of English constructions: “After X had done Y,” “When [or Once] X had occurred,” and so on. Using a single formula, such as “Having done X,” might have seemed more consistent, but of course the Greek lacked such unpleasant repetition, with each different-looking participle having a different effect and presenting a new sound to auditors.
Again, although in a very few cases Josephus’ frequent use of the present tense for past events may find a passable parallel, especially in colloquial English (“A man walks into a bar and says…”), we have usually substituted the English past tense. In short, we have not pursued literalness at all costs.
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