All great books are in conversation with one another, often asking many of the same fundamental questions, sometimes suggesting roughly similar answers, and occasionally doing so with knowing winks across the centuries. Plato’s Republic and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile are two such books, and since the latter was written with the former firmly in view, it is not surprising that both grapple with the same daunting challenge: how to educate free human beings, particularly in the crucial business of discerning between appearances and reality.
In the twentieth century, as it happened, both of these works were translated by Allan Bloom, a spirited, inspiring, and somewhat controversial scholar who became something of a legend in his own day at the University of Chicago. Given his reputation, however, it may seem surprising that his authoritative renderings of Plato’s subtle Greek and Rousseau’s extravagant French were remarkably, even ploddingly, literal. Bloom apparently wanted them that way. In the preface to his Republic translation, he described his work as “slavish” and “cumbersome,” made so, he claimed, to liberate students from “tyranny of the translator,” especially the one who is advancing an agenda. Discussing his version of Emile, Bloom reasoned that a translator cannot make the effort of understanding the book for the reader; instead, he can only get out of the way in order to make making the effort possible. He considered the resulting strangeness of his work a pedagogical stratagem aimed at challenging the modern mass reader—a type that Bloom both mocked and sought to uplift in his best-selling 1987 jeremiad, The Closing of the American Mind. In translation, Bloom as much as said, it takes a lot of work to help us see the real thing.