Nov
07
2009
That Must Have Been a Bad Translation
While working on my sermon for Sunday I ran across this comment from Marcus Dods (1871) in the Translator’s Preface to Augustine’s City of God:
Of English translations there has been an unaccountable poverty. Only one exists, and this so exceptionally bad, so unlike the racy [i.e., vigorous] translations of the seventeenth century in general, so inaccurate, and so frequently unintelligible, that it is not impossible it may have done something towards giving the English public a distaste for the book itself.
Ah, the art of a good put-down. I trust this one was well-deserved.
3 Comments
“Scholarly smack-talk” is what my Bible nerd friends and I call it. I love it. I devoted a whole post to it awhile back. As I mention there, no living scholar that I know of does it better than Carson.
I love this, too!
The English, especially, are particularly adept at the clever (and nuanced) smackdown.
“Scholarly smack-talk”…!
Wish I’d coined that…