"The Shrike and the Chipmunks, the Philologists and the Translators, Aeschylus and Apuleius" Sarah Ruden

James Thurber in Fables for Our Time depicts cultural concerns and activities in hard categories dictated largely by gender: men are preoccupied with abstractions, women with practicalities. Corresponding divisions supposed to prevail in the academy are between philology and other more-scientific disciplines on the one hand, practiced largely for their own sakes, and disciplines such as translation on the other, geared toward teaching and popularizing, so that the actual scholarly processes can be less precise, less self-justifying, and less self-referential. In my experience as a translator, however, I have found these categories to be all but meaningless. I must often apply lexical evidence, for example, in an almost mathmatical manner. I illustrate this with examples from my translations of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and Apuleius’s The Golden Ass.