DAVID MAYERNIK
LTD.

The Italians have a compact aphorism for the problem of translation: traduttore, traditore. Translator, Traitor in English. To translate is to betray. This gets at the fundamental problem of accessing texts in other languages (although T. S. Eliot supposedly said he could tell Dante was a great poet reading him in Italian, before Eliot could speak Italian himself). But translations can take other forms, like texts into the visual arts. Or into films.

Historians, inevitably, have a point of view. And it is right to be mildly suspicious of what that point of view is. But there are those scholars who seem (though how can we really know?) to be able to access the past on its own terms, to be able to operate almost like a native in that foreign land where “they do things differently”

Readers were meant to analyze these [narratives], in order to equip themselves with the prudence needed in the active life, and then to emulate or avoid emulating the actions they depicted when faced with similar circumstances.

At some level every culture asserts a view of history that fits its self-perception. And for some time there has been a strong undercurrent of suspicion of history’s value as model or lesson.