A Note on Translations

Translation is always a treason, and as a Ming author observes, can at its best be only the reverse side of a brocade,—all the threads are there, but not the subtlety of colour or design. But, after all, what great doctrine is there which is easy to expound? The ancient sages never put their teachings in systematic form. They spoke in paradoxes, for they were afraid of uttering half-truths. They began by talking like fools and ended by making their hearers wise. Laotse himself, with his quaint humour, says, "If people of inferior intelligence hear of the Tao, they laugh immensely. It would not be the Tao unless they laughed at it."

(Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea)

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This is the sad reality of English editions of the Neoplatonists, too. Thomas Taylor is very likely the only translator who thoroughly understood the material, but his speech is archaic—almost needing translation, itself—and the manuscripts he worked from were lacking. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Sentences, where the manuscript that Taylor translated was significantly edited by some scribe, leading Taylor to write footnotes critical of Porphyry. (And don't get me started on Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie's translation of the Sentences, either—what a mess!)

The only way forward is, and must be, not to follow Porphyry or Plotinus or even Plato, but to trim one's sails by their example and find one's own way through the wine-faced sea. "Seek not the path of the Ancients," writes Basho: "seek that which the Ancients sought."