BMCR 2009.04.63: Hughes Dominick on Howatson, Plato. The Symposium. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy

M. C. Howatson, Frisbee C. C. Sheffield (ed.), Plato. The Symposium.
Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy.  Cambridge/New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2008.  Pp. xxxv, 91.  ISBN 9780521682985.
$13.99 (pb).

Reviewed by Yancy Hughes Dominick, Seattle University, Seattle, WA
([email protected])
Word count:  1822 words
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Table of Contents
(http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0806/2007051668-t.html)

The laudable mission of the Cambridge Texts in the History of
Philosophy series is to "expand the range, variety, and quality of
texts in the history of philosophy" available in English. In some
cases--Cicero, Sextus Empiricus--that mission is accomplished by
presenting new translations of less well-known texts and authors; in
others--as in Roger Crisp's edition of Aristotle's Nicomachean
Ethics--the series strives to publish translations that pay attention
to recent scholarship and that offer fresh and readable texts.

Plato's Symposium is, in the context of that mission, a challenge. Far
from lesser-known, it is among Plato's most read works, and it is
surely more popular outside of philosophy courses than any other
Platonic text. And unlike some ancient works, which have been taken up
by relatively few recent translators, there are by my count seven
English-language editions of the Symposium that have been published in
the last twenty years.[[1]]

Publishing a new translation of such a text necessarily presents a
range of difficulties. (The same must of course apply to reviewing such
a publication. I will clearly not have the luxury, for example, of
comparing Howatson's translations of particular passages with a
representative sample of other translations, even recent ones.)

Certain questions, then, need asking: does the world need another
translation of this text right now? Who is the audience for such a
publication? Does this translation offer a clearer access to Plato than
others? Or a richer scholarly context? In my estimation, the answers to
most of the above are: perhaps, and probably the intended student
audience will benefit from this edition, as it contains an informative
introduction by Frisbee C. C. Sheffield and an excellent set of notes
and glossaries.

The translation itself, however, does not capture enough of Plato's
style, and in the interest of bold interpretation occludes certain
themes and connections between the various speeches. If I were to
assign this to students, it would only be in combination with another,
more lyrical translation of this wonderful text.

Sheffield's Introduction does a nice job of explaining the backgrounds
of most characters--though more details appear in the Glossary of
Names. She also helps the reader understand the significance--within
the text and within the historical setting--of both eros and of
symposia. She then offers a brief account of each speech, showing how
the early speeches relate to each other as well as how each raises
aspects of problems confronted in Socrates' speech.

Sheffield then offers a more detailed analysis of Socrates' speech, the
speech in which Socrates relates the conversation that he may have once
had with a woman named Diotima. Sheffield's account draws on her
compelling recent book, Plato's Symposium: The Ethics of Desire.[[2]] A
few features of the analysis in this present volume warrant brief
discussion. In addition to a thorough, thoughtful discussion of
Socrates' intellectualism or "psychological eudaimonism," Sheffield
offers an interesting reading of the final stage in the famous "ascent"
passage, according to which the "true virtue" that the successful lover
gives birth to at 212a is identical with the activity of contemplation
of the form of beauty. This interpretation has the benefit of
explaining Diotima's claim that the life of contemplation is a life
"which most of all a human being should live, in the contemplation of
beauty itself" (211d, in Howatson's translation). If some further
product were the true goal, this focus on contemplation might sound
off-key.

On the other hand, F. C. White has recently made a strong case for
seeing the mention of giving birth to true virtue as an indication that
the successful lover must do more than merely contemplate the form of
beauty,[[3]] and to the extent that that account is compelling, it
would have been nice to see Sheffield address it more directly.

One other interesting feature of the Introduction is the time that
Sheffield spends on Gregory Vlastos' famous claim that the successful
lover described by Diotima cannot love actual, whole persons as a
result of that lover's focus on the ascent to the form of beauty. Now
that is certainly a fascinating worry, but it surprises me that of all
the possible critical discussions of the Symposium, that one should
feature so prominently, and should do so in the absence of some of the
many fascinating responses, as for example the one found in Martha
Nussbaum's account of the dialogue.[[4]]

Following the Introduction is a brief Chronology, a regrettably brief
bibliography ("Further reading"), a Translator's Note, and the text of
the dialogue. The book ends with a very thorough glossary of Greek
terms as well as a glossary of names. These last are quite useful, and
would clearly benefit both undergraduate and postgraduate readers.
There are some small oddities (in such a thorough glossary, why leave
out a word like <greek>a)lh/qea</greek>? why abandon the Stephanus
pagination in the Glossary of Names? transliterated Greek is no easier
to read than real Greek, and it looks quite odd--what good does it do
anyone?), but on the whole the glossaries serve the reader well. The
text ends with a brief index of subjects.

The translation itself is clear and intelligible, and has a helpful if
almost frightening number of footnotes (227 notes for the dialogue's 51
Stephanus pages). Some notes offer the transliterated Greek word, while
others contain extensive historical or philosophical information for
the reader, as with note 15, which details the typical seating
arrangements at symposia.

In some cases, however, something seems to have gone wrong. Page 9
contains eleven notes, ten of which inform the reader of the Greek
words that correspond to words in the translation. That seems like a
lot, but I could forgive simple excess. That same page, however, which
presents the translation of 178b-179b, contains three uses of forms of
the word <greek>kalo/s</greek>. The first occurrence, translated as
"good" (at 178c6) is noted, but the other two are not, which is
especially problematic because they are each translated
differently--"honourable" at 178d2 and "noble" at 178d4. Those are all
fine translations (though I admit to being partial to using "beautiful"
as often as possible), but in the context of this many notes on
translation, I object to the silence concerning the uses here of such
an important word. To put it another way, page 9 either needs far fewer
notes, or at least a few more.

My purpose here is not to quibble over the particulars of the
translation, but I do want to mention three more areas. First of all,
Howatson's choice of "right" and "wrong" as translations of
<greek>kalo/s</greek> and <greek>ai)sxro/s</greek> in Pausanias' speech
strikes me as ill-conceived. As Howatson herself acknowledges, those
who question that translation "have a strong case" (p. 12 n. 55). More
worrisome to me, though, is the fact that this translation masks the
continuity between various speeches. Part of the movement of the
dialogue involves the various characters' attempts to develop and
respond to each others' claims about ideas like love and beauty. When
Agathon, for example, asserts that Love is "supreme in beauty" (195a7),
readers without Greek would have a hard time recognizing that as the
same term at work in Pausanias' speech. When the translation covers up
these lexical parallels, readers lose out.

The second section that concerns me is Agathon's speech (194e-197e).
It's a lovely, silly speech, and first-time readers need to be able to
see that. It's also a speech that employs some painfully bad logic of
course, and Howatson does a nice job of offering a clear and readable
text, which helps highlight the fallacies. Agathon's bad reasoning
loses its force, however, if it doesn't sound all too pretty. Here are
some lines from Howatson's translation of the final moment (197d1-6):


It is Love who takes from us our sense of estrangement and fills us
with a sense of kinship; who causes us to associate with one another as
on this occasion, and at festivals, dances and sacrifices is the
guiding spirit. He imparts gentleness, he banishes harshness; he is
lavish with goodwill, sparing of ill-will; he is gracious and kindly;
viewed with admiration by the wise and with wonder by the gods . . .


After the speech concludes, Socrates' jokes that Agathon has "stunned
every listener with the beauty of his language" (198b4-5). Readers of
Howatson's translation would, I dare say, be surprised by that
assertion. Her translation is lucid, and it is true to the content. But
the style is almost the entire point of Agathon's speech, especially in
that closing bit. Nehamas and Woodruff come closer, and to me suggest
some of what Howatson omits:


Love fills us with togetherness and drains all of our divisiveness
away. Love calls gatherings like these together. In feasts, in dances,
and in ceremonies, he gives the lead. Love moves us to mildness,
removes from us wildness. He is giver of kindness, never of meanness.
Gracious, kindly--let wise men see and gods admire!


Obviously, the fact that Howatson fails to capture Agathon's lyricism
does not by itself entail that her translation fails. It does, however,
point to one of the key difficulties with this text and with this
particular translation. The Symposium is a beautiful book, not just a
book about beauty. Howatson acknowledges this challenge in her Note
(xxxiv), but it's not always clear that she compromises in the right
places.

I also want to mention Howatson's version of the ascent passage.
Overall, it's a very good translation, in many ways better than other
recent versions. To have Diotima say that beauty itself is not "like a
discourse or a branch of knowledge" (211a7), for example, makes nice,
concise sense of a difficult bit of Greek (<greek>ou)de/ tis lo/gos
ou)de/ tis e)pisth/mh</greek>). (Nehamas and Woodruff offer "one idea
or one kind of knowledge," which to me just adds unnecessary
confusion.) When Howatson gets to the word <greek>monoeide/s</greek> at
211b1, however, she offers "single in substance," which both raises a
number of distracting connotations and fails to square with the
glossary in this very volume, where the much more mild-mannered "single
in form" appears.

Finally, Howatson has Alcibiades tell his listeners that his method
will be to make "comparisons" (215a4-5). That is a fine translation of
<greek>ei)ko/nes</greek>, but again Howatson hides fruitful parallels
from readers. Earlier, Diotima had described the successful lover as
birthing no images (212a3-4); later, Alcibiades describes Socrates'
discourse as full of "images of virtue" (222a4). The choice of
"comparisons" at 215a works against readers like myself, who wish to
examine the various attitudes towards things like images in Plato's
texts.

These points are relatively minor, and do not of course make the
translation overly problematic or unreadable. They do, however, remind
of the difficulty and challenge posed by a text like the Symposium.
Although I view this volume--and especially its notes and
glossaries--as a useful addition and aid for students and scholars, I'm
afraid that I can do so only in spite of the translation.

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Notes:


1.  Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Hackett, 1989); R. E. Allen
(Yale, 1991); Avi Sharon (Focus, 1997); Christopher Rowe (Aris and
Phillips, 1998); Robin Waterfield (Oxford, 1998); Seth Bernardete
(Chicago, 2001); Christopher Gill (Penguin, 2003).

2.  Oxford, 2006.

3.  "Virtue in Plato's Symposium," in The Classical Quarterly (2004)
54.2, 366-378.

4.  The Fragility of Goodness, Updated Edition (Cambridge, 2001). pp.
165-199.


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