scholars uncomfortable; after all, by perpetuating such inaccessible English texts, they create a demand for interpreters that only they can fill. I have criticized the current state of Aristotle-translating at length in the introduction to a recent translation of my own. There it seemed necessary to explain to those familiar with other translations the many departures they were about to encounter. Here a briefer justification may suffice: My aim is to give you in translation an experience as close as I can make it to reading the original. The original is written not for specialists but for generally educated people of any sort who are willing to think hard. Where Aristotle exploits the resources of the Greek language to capture his meaning, the translation will be in bad English; where he departs from Greek usage to coin new words and novel ways of saying things, the translation will be in worse English. From the point of view of a classicist, a good English translation of a classical author is one that finds, for every word or phrase in the original, some equivalent expression that reads smoothly in our language. This may be a good practice with some kinds of writing, but philosophic meaning cannot be captured in habitual uses of language. The point of view of a professional philosopher may, however, pay too much heed to the linguistic choices that have become habitual in modern philosophy and in the secondary literature, at the expense of faithfulness to the original.18
(I would say that – in connection with Klein’s important essay, with Heidegger’s putting existing translations of Aristotle into question, and with Klein’s own overall understanding of Greek and of Aristotle – Sachs revolutionized the translation and study of Aristotle in English. Sachs went on to translate many texts of Aristotle, including Metaphysics, Physics, Nichomachean Ethics, and De Anima. These translations are the backbone for retranslating Aristotle into English and thus retrieving the thought in Aristotle’s “said.” Turning now to the words of Aristotle, I will present a few texts from his Metaphysics and show where and how this fresh and “less Latin” way of translating Aristotle fits in with what Heidegger calls the “return” to the Greeks.)
Please keep in mind the difference between dynamic movement and static potential or static completedness, between concrete
18 J. Sachs, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, xxxiv–xxxv.