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Feb. 7th, 2011 08:38 pm26. Tartuffe, tr. Wilbur
27. Symposium, tr. Shelley
In the latter Socrates puts his own vision of love in the mouth of the foreign prophetess Diotima, but in quoting her has her allude to Aristophanes' presumably extemporized myth of twenty pages past, something Aristophanes himself notices. Since the dialogue is itself told by someone who heard it from someone else, this works as a defense of what Plato himself is doing: putting his own words into the mouth of a teacher who didn't publish (the two layers of someone-elses have previously clarified that way-too-young Plato does not purport to know exactly what happened at that apparently famous party, despite directly representing Socrates in so many others). Of course, since it's Plato's Socrates who's doing it, that's a hearsay, hence valueless, corroboration - but it does work as a kind of explanation of what Plato's doing with Socrates. And if Socrates' reliance on Diotima (and his daemon) is well enough known, maybe Plato's readers will accept the convention of a fictive authority as actually stemming from Socrates, or at any rate see how both author and character use it to serve an educative purpose. The Socratic dialogue isn't about reaching truth so much as dispelling error, but once Socrates has shut everyone who's wrong up he turns back to his other trick, mythmaking within the confines of the non-disproven. Which maybe all of us do.
Bloom, whose earliest work was on Shelley, always fought the notion of his being especially Platonic, I think because it discounts the personal element in Shelley's quest: Intellectual Beauty, the soul out of his soul, the Witch, the smiling light, is usually a 'thee,' often a she, and Shelley's of two minds about whether his wavering access to her has to do with his own limitations or whether she might not quite exist. Shelley's putting some of his own phrases in Plato's mouth here, though allegedly without bruising the limits of translation overmuch - but maybe he's constructing a Shelley's Plato as much as he's admitting to being Plato's Shelley. Which is quite Platonic of him.
27. Symposium, tr. Shelley
In the latter Socrates puts his own vision of love in the mouth of the foreign prophetess Diotima, but in quoting her has her allude to Aristophanes' presumably extemporized myth of twenty pages past, something Aristophanes himself notices. Since the dialogue is itself told by someone who heard it from someone else, this works as a defense of what Plato himself is doing: putting his own words into the mouth of a teacher who didn't publish (the two layers of someone-elses have previously clarified that way-too-young Plato does not purport to know exactly what happened at that apparently famous party, despite directly representing Socrates in so many others). Of course, since it's Plato's Socrates who's doing it, that's a hearsay, hence valueless, corroboration - but it does work as a kind of explanation of what Plato's doing with Socrates. And if Socrates' reliance on Diotima (and his daemon) is well enough known, maybe Plato's readers will accept the convention of a fictive authority as actually stemming from Socrates, or at any rate see how both author and character use it to serve an educative purpose. The Socratic dialogue isn't about reaching truth so much as dispelling error, but once Socrates has shut everyone who's wrong up he turns back to his other trick, mythmaking within the confines of the non-disproven. Which maybe all of us do.
Bloom, whose earliest work was on Shelley, always fought the notion of his being especially Platonic, I think because it discounts the personal element in Shelley's quest: Intellectual Beauty, the soul out of his soul, the Witch, the smiling light, is usually a 'thee,' often a she, and Shelley's of two minds about whether his wavering access to her has to do with his own limitations or whether she might not quite exist. Shelley's putting some of his own phrases in Plato's mouth here, though allegedly without bruising the limits of translation overmuch - but maybe he's constructing a Shelley's Plato as much as he's admitting to being Plato's Shelley. Which is quite Platonic of him.
