Chapter 6 A Note on the Translation

Abstract

Someone remarked to me once that Ver Eecke’s French translations of Apollonius, Pappus, and Diophantus are so well done the original Greek text can almost be reconstructed from them. In translating Halley, I kept that in mind as a kind of ideal; however, I did not wish to martyr the text to the ideal. So, while I tried, for example, to translate consistently—using the same English for the same Latin—I could not follow this through without straining my own ears’ tolerance, not to speak of my readers’ ears. Thus, for the most part I translate, say, nempe as “namely,” but sometimes as “naturally”; vero I sometimes translate as “in fact,” sometimes as “indeed,” and other times I simply leave it untranslated. On the other hand, a word such as “given,” datum, is so important in the text and in Greek mathematical discourse that it demands stubborn consistency. Thus, while “given” could easily serve as a translation of propositum, and certainly would sound better to modern ears, I always translate propositum literally as “proposed”—the proposed sum of squares, the proposed length, the proposed difference, etc.