Customer Reviews

Selected Dialogues of Plato: The Benjamin Jowett Translation (Modern Library Classics)

5 star:		(2)
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2 star:		(1)
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The review criticizing Jowett's translation of the Republic is irrelevant for two reasons. First, this isn't the Republic. Second, it's not really Jowett's translation: it's a substantial revision of Jowett's translation of some of Plato's most widely read dialogues (Ion, Phaedrus, Symposium, Apology, Protagoras).

Simply put, though I'm no fit judge of the translation's fidelity to Plato, I found this to be the most fluid, delightful rendering of Plato that I've ever come across. It is a masterpiece of literary nuance -- representing Socrates as the witty, weird, sometimes obnoxious, often poetic soul he must have been. Of course this is greatly due to Jowett's lovely prose style, but Pelliccia deserves laurels for so sensitively updating and de-Victorianizing the work. I've compared this revision to Jowett's original and find this to be much improved. Snap it up.

Great piece of philosophical literature. Well annotated and translated. Excellent, 5 stars

The Jowett translation of "Republic" is not good. I struggled with it in college [in the '60s], and never knew why it was such a chore until I read Allan Bloom's great translation, and his introduction to his great translation. John Wild explained further why the Jowett translation is so "off," in his "Plato and His Enemies and the Theory of Natural Law" -- which is, unfortunately, out of print. But go for Bloom's translation, it is wonderful.