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Wittgenstein

Tractatus 7.1: Translation and Silence

Peter Caws considers how much is lost in translation.

There’s a story about an American evangelist who was challenged about something in his preaching that didn’t agree with the Greek of the New Testament. He is supposed to have replied “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me.” Very funny, we all think. But a lot of otherwise well-read people are a bit like that in some ways. It’s not just that pious readers think of the Bible as an English book (the King James Version, after all, is an English book, and a classic at that), but that many people forget – it’s not that they don’t know, they just forget – that Aesop’s fables and Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales and so on weren’t originally English books.

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