| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Damaged Goods by Upton Sinclair: she wanted her wages and her railroad fare home. She wanted them
at once, and she would not leave until she got them. George and
his mother, in the midst of all their anguish of mind, had to go
through a disgusting scene with this coarse and angry woman.
They had no such sum of money in the house, and the nurse refused
to accept a check. She knew nothing about a check. It was so
much paper, and might be some trick that they were playing on
her. She kept repeating her old formula, "I am nothing but a
poor country woman." Nor would she be contented with the promise
that she would receive the money the next day. She seemed to be
afraid that if she left the house she would be surrendering her
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: BOY: I do.
SOCRATES: And you know that a square figure has these four lines equal?
BOY: Certainly.
SOCRATES: And these lines which I have drawn through the middle of the
square are also equal?
BOY: Yes.
SOCRATES: A square may be of any size?
BOY: Certainly.
SOCRATES: And if one side of the figure be of two feet, and the other side
be of two feet, how much will the whole be? Let me explain: if in one
direction the space was of two feet, and in the other direction of one
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: 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
most difficult and to diverge most widely from the English idiom. The
translator will often have to convert the more abstract Greek into the more
concrete English, or vice versa, and he ought not to force upon one
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