Stuart on generosity

Here’s Stuart Elden with a couple of further good examples of INTELLECTUAL GENEROSITY.

I’m not sure I’m in 100% agreement that translation is always an act of intellectual generosity. In many ways translation is a thankless task, yes, and people love to score points by nitpicking translations.

However, to be a true act of generosity of the sort I was describing, the person in question should be of a level comparable to that which they translate. For example, Macquarrie and Robinson did great work in my opinion translating Being and Time, but that’s the sort of thing that scholars do– translate great works. They deserve our eternal gratitude for having done such a fine job, but I wouldn’t say that translating Being and Time is above and beyond the call of duty for a philosophy professor. It fits our job description.

That’s why I thought of Baudelaire translating Poe. To some extent he was translating Poe instead of writing more of his own work, potentially a great sacrifice to literature. Or what if Quine had spent five years translating Being and Time despite disagreeing with it? That would have been an amazing act of intellectual generosity. [ADDENDUM: I say this as someone who translated three whole books. It seems to me that “generosity” would be overstating the case as to my motives for doing it. In a couple of cases I was paid very well, and in all of the cases it gave useful intellectual exercise that I valued. It was a fair business trade, in other words, and while I would expect a token thanks in those cases, it wouldn’t have to be any more than token.]

In the case of Boethius translating Greek philosophy I’m willing to call it formidable generosity as well. That’s a fine example.