Plato

>>7365057
it will look nice on your bookshelf.

no you can easily find it to download online

>>7365531
this guy gets it.

if anything, ignore the primary and only read the secondary literature on it.

also... /hist/

>>7365057
Pretty sure the complete works have shitty translations

No, the translation isn't poetic enough. Academic translators turned into a dialogue between robots.

>>7365539
>not /hist/
>slow moving board
>religious or philosophical literature
go to reddit if you want to discuss the martian, fag

>>7365057
Yes. The other collected works edition contains outdated and somewhat flawed translations, and the editorial apparatus is shitty. While the completed works edited by Cooper doesn't contain the *best* translations, they're all at least solid, and Cooper's editorial notes are often good. He gives a pretty fair and balanced discussion of the state of Plato scholarship when it was put together, and he offers a not completely inaccurate view of scholarly consensus on the dialogues and other writings.

>>7365539
>if anything, ignore the primary and only read the secondary literature on it.
Yeah okay

>>7365774
>No, the translation isn't poetic enough. Academic translators turned into a dialogue between robots.
That's not a great argument against it. Do you read Greek? Do you demand a "poetic" (whatever that really amounts to) rendering of Parmenides, Sophist, Statesman, and Philebus, some of the dialogues with the most technical speech in the corpus, and noted for their incredibly dry style?

>>7365057
Yes, if you really want to get into Plato. It's nice to have a study copy with all the dialogues read at hand for when you need to flip back and forth between them.

You'll still want individual copies with even better translations for the post important dialogues. Hackett is readable but not for deep reading.

For instance, the Republic within is Grube/Reeve, I think. You'll definitely want Bloom's instead.

>>7365539
It's literature you fucking moron

>>7365798
Why is Bloom's superior? I'm working my way through the Hackett complete works (around page 700 now), and with the Republic a few hundred pages away, I'd like to know more.

>>7366192
Bloom's translation is good for careful study of the dialogue. It's accurate to the Greek, it's "literal" without falling prey to dumb "one-to-one" correspondences of terms, he has a lot of good etymological/historical/technical notes in the back, and he doesn't try to explain away ambiguities by translating them away or by replacing strange formulations in the work itself with modern jargon that's anachronistic.

Where he's "literal" is in his attempt to preserve certain key terms of the whole work by translating them one way, helping a student of the work keep track of how certain terms are treated differently over the course of the arguments of the book, and allowing them to think through the matter for themselves instead of relying too slavishly on the translator for an understanding. It benefits the reader who wants to compare different passages to see how a term like "opinion" or "poetry" is dealt with, especially since those terms might receive different treatments at different points, and since sometimes more easygoing translators accidently conceal that certain terms will appear in almost unexpected places, either opening or narrowing the argument in surprising ways.

That means it's also perhaps not the most "accessible" translation for relatively new readers of the Republic. But shit, one could surely do worse. (Cornford's translation, for example.)

>>7366192
Read Hackett first--read Bloom after.

>>7366222
Awesome, thanks a lot for the insight. I really appreciate it.

>>7366245
That seems like a good recommendation, considering the comments of the anon above.

Thanks for the help guys!

>>7366296
Cheers! Good luck in your reading!

Why do people care about Plato? He got BTFO all day by Diogenes during his time and then later Aristotle accomplished 500 times more than he ever could.

>>7367183
get out

>>7367183
>He got BTFO all day by Diogenes
>BTFO all day
>by Diogenes

Top kek anon

How bad are the worst translations in the Complete Works?

>>7367709
Well, sometimes you get a translation with dumb-sounding modern phrases like "What's up". only occasionally. A number of them are revised Jowett and Grube translations.