In spite of all the essays that scholars and dilettanti have written about translating the classics, the task is chiefly valuable as an agreeable pastime for elderly gentlemen with time on their hands. And one may feel sure that such men will never be satisfied with anything that other elderly men with time on their hands have said about the matter. The game is endless, and therein lies its charm.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Friday, May 09, 2014
An Agreeable Pastime for Elderly Gentlemen
John J. Chapman, Two Greek Plays: The Philoctetes of Sophocles and the Medea of Euripides (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1928), p. 114: