the three 'S's of my saturday

Socrates, Sisyphus, and Serendipity.

So a couple of weeks ago i was working an a Plato paper, and when examine very specific quotes i like to look at two of three different translations because even the best translators can make mistakes and i want to stay as close to the ideas as i can. When i did this for one of my quotes from the symposium (i guess tat could have been a forth 'S'...)i discovered that there was a drastic difference between the texts. I checked a couple of other sources and found even more variations on the quote. Frustrated i gathered up i think 5 or so variations of the quote, as well as the original greek and brought it to my professor. He translated the original for me and showed me how four of the five weren't really all that different and that for the purpose of my paper i should just stick with the course text book. The fifth translation he said was terrible and he didn't understand how the translator got it and suggested i forgot i ever read that particular version.

Later i was talking to some people about this problem i had been working through and one of my professors suggested i look in the new collection which had recently been printed. I did some research on this new collection and heard nothing but good things about it. It was completely new translations, included some of the lesser know texts, vigorous peer review, a lot of people in the business of knowing called it the best translation available. Unfortunately i was almost done my paper and there was no way to get my hands on a copy fast enough, but i was intrigued and wanted to check it out anyways, so i went to the library, someone had it out, so i recalled it.

Yesterday, the person who had it finally brought it back and i got a chance to satisfy my curiosity as to what the quote i had been working with said in this edition. Would you believe that what i found was the fifth terrible translation that i had been told to forgot? But the rest of the collection is quite good. I've been thumbing through it all weekend re-reading some of my favorite passages and discovering some new ones. Before i go on to one of the new passages i found two more things on this translation. Yes it is the one i asked for for christmas (nudge nudge wink wink) and a really neat thing that it does is in MOST area's of dubious translation it will footnote some alternatives and why they use the one thay do. Not many other editiosn have this kind of openess to their own failability.

But one of the new dialogs which was in this edition and non of the others i have read before was one called Sisyphus. Spelt the same as the myth talked about by Camus. That is not to say that they are about the same person or idea. The dialog of Sisyphus discusses what exactly it is to deliberate something. Is it something we know or that we don't know? It's a short and intresting text which i think instantly cracked my top ten list of Platonic Dialogs. Now i've already said and i emphisise that this has nothing to do with Camus or absurdity...but at the same time there is a little bit of me that smiles and likes to think there is.

No legitimate academic would ever try to make the conection, and neither will i, but it is kinda neat. What is deliberating? is it kinda like rolling a rock up a hill just to watch it roll down the other side? Does it seem like a torturous task to some? must we imagine the debators happy? Does it get us no where? do we do it anyways?

It made me smile to compare the two, and there is a little peice of me deep down inside which thinks maybe Socrates/Plato knew what Camus would one day be on about. Just maybe they were talking about absurdity all those years ago. Maybe there is a peice of the puzzle missing, a lost chapter in the Platonic corpus that explores existentialism centuries before Kiekagaard.

But i know these are all just wishfull thinking. The names are a coincidence. Serendipity. At least it made me smile for a few hours.