| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain: upon his breast and holding his poor wilted flower.
And thus he would die -- out in the cold world, with no
shelter over his homeless head, no friendly hand to
wipe the death-damps from his brow, no loving face to
bend pityingly over him when the great agony came.
And thus SHE would see him when she looked out upon
the glad morning, and oh! would she drop one little
tear upon his poor, lifeless form, would she heave
one little sigh to see a bright young life so rudely blight-
ed, so untimely cut down?
The window went up, a maid-servant's discordant
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: stage. It was a high leap, but nothing to such a trained athlete.
He would have got safely away, had not his spur caught in the
flag that draped the front of the box. He fell, the torn flag
trailing on his spur; but though the fall had broken his leg, he
rose instantly brandishing his knife and shouting, "Sic Semper
Tyrannis!" fled rapidly across the stage and out of sight. Major
Rathbone shouted, "Stop him!" The cry, "He has shot the
President!" rang through the theatre, and from the audience,
stupid at first with surprise, and wild afterward with excitement
and horror, men jumped upon the stage in pursuit of the assassin.
But he ran through the familiar passages, leaped upon his horse,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: part of him will be lost to the English reader. It should read as an
original work, and should also be the most faithful transcript which can be
made of the language from which the translation is taken, consistently with
the first requirement of all, that it be English. Further, the translation
being English, it should also be perfectly intelligible in itself without
reference to the Greek, the English being really the more lucid and exact
of the two languages. In some respects it may be maintained that ordinary
English writing, such as the newspaper article, is superior to Plato: at
any rate it is couched in language which is very rarely obscure. On the
other hand, the greatest writers of Greece, Thucydides, Plato, Aeschylus,
Sophocles, Pindar, Demosthenes, are generally those which are found to be
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