BY THE SAME AUTHOR CORPUS POETARUM LATINORUM. Two volumes. G. Bell & Sons, Ltd. Each 25s. net. LUCAN, DE BELLO CIVILI VII, VIII. Cambridge University Press. 2s. 9d. and 3s. 6d. PHAEDRUS. Text with Critical Notes. Oxford University Press. Paper cover, 5s. net. Cloth, 6s. net. PROPERTIUS. Text with Critical Notes. G. Bell & Sons, Ltd. 4s. 6d. net. SELECTIONS FROM TIBULLUS. Macmillan & Co., Ltd. 6s. SILVA MANILIANA. Cambridge University Press. 3s. net. TIBULLUS. Text with Critical Notes. Oxford University Press. Paper cover 2s. net. Cloth, 3s. net. SERMO LATINUS. A Short Guide to Latin Prose Composition. Macmillan & Co., Ltd. 3s. 6d. DEAD LANGUAGE AND DEAD LANGUAGES. John Murray. Is. net. AND TRANSLATIONS THEORY AND PRACTICE BY J. P. POSTGATE, LITT.D., F.B.A. Emeritus Professor of Latin in the University of Liverpool, OMNIA VERTVNTVR LONDON G. BELL AND SONS, LTD. 1922 FOR fifty years in various capacities I have had to concern myself with Translation. In the hope that what I had done and suffered might be made of use to other workers in this field I resolved to give the results of a part of my efforts to the world, prefaced by a brief statement of the principles and methods to which, consciously or unconsciously, my practice had adhered. This I soon discovered could not be fitly presented without reference to the work of my predecessors, and the statement has changed to something like a treatise. That such a handling of the subject was not entirely superfluous may be seen not merely from its own importance which, educational literary and international, was never greater than at present, but from the confusion and uncertainty which have embarrassed it for so long. I have dealt chiefly, but by no means exclusively, with the two foreign languages in which I am most at home. This need not be deemed a disadvantage. The problems of translation from a modern language have everywhere their analogues in translation from an ancient one, whereas there are many affecting the latter to which the former shows nothing to correspond. While on this side I have limited myself, on another I have taken my inquiry beyond what of late has been usual. Translation, like a Tanus bifrons, has a double outlook, with passages this way and that; and the sardonic visages surmounting its approaches seem to |