Selected Dialogues of Plato: The Benjamin Jowett Translation

By Plato

Book Overview

Benjamin Jowett's translations of Plato have long been classics in their own right. In this volume, Professor Hayden Pelliccia has revised Jowett's renderings of five key dialogues, giving us a modern Plato faithful to both Jowett's best features and Plato's own masterly style. Gathered here are many of Plato's liveliest and richest texts. Ion takes up the question of poetry and introduces the Socratic method. Protagoras discusses poetic interpretation and shows why cross-examination is the best way to get at the truth. Phaedrus takes on the nature of rhetoric, psychology, and love, as does the famous Symposium. Finally, Apology gives us Socrates' art of persuasion put to the ultimate test--defending his own life. Pelliccia's new Introduction to this volume clarifies its contents and addresses the challenges of translating Plato freshly and accurately. In its combination of accessibility and depth, Selected Dialogues of Plato is the ideal introduction to one of the key thinkers of all time.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375758402
• ISBN13: 9780375758409
• Release Date: September 2001
• Publisher: Modern Library
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.93 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Very well done translation

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.

Very Enlightening

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