To read, to read a book, is, like all the other really human occupations, a Utopian task. I call “utopian” every action whose initial intention cannot be fulfilled in the development of its activity and which has to be satisfied with approximations essentially contradictory to the purpose which had started it. Thus “to read” begins by signifying the project of understanding a text fully. Now this is impossible. It is only possible with a great effort to extract a more or (...) less important portion of what the text has tried to say, communicate, make known; but there will always remain an “illegible” residue. It is, on the other hand, probable that, while we are making this effort, we may read, at the same time, into the text; that is, we may understand things which the author has not “meant” to say, and, nevertheless, he has “said” them; he has presented them to us involuntarily—even more, against his professed purpose. This twofold condition of speech, so strange and antithetical, appears in two principles of my “Axioms for a New Philology,” which are as follows:1.Every utterance is deficient—it says less than it wishes to say.2.Every utterance is exuberant—it conveys more than it plans. (shrink)

To the recent boom in literature on the character of Thomas Jefferson we may now add Anthony Wallace's fine volume, which undertakes a painstaking analysis of Jefferson's abiding, multifaceted fascination with Native Americans to answer important questions about Jefferson's personality and the origins of America's “love‐hate” relationship with Native peoples. Wallace contends that Jefferson's embodiment of some of the major dilemmas in American culture appeared most conspicuously in his relations with Indians . A pioneer of interdisciplinary scholarship whose publishing career (...) has spanned six decades, Wallace ranges far and wide in his attempt to pin down the sources and ramifications of Jefferson's interactions with Native Americans as scholar, land speculator, mourner, and president. The result is a richly detailed and provocative contribution to historical understanding of this formative era in American Indian policymaking.Wallace is interested in explaining the mental gymnastics that enabled Jefferson to be at once the learned admirer of Native character, language, and artifacts and also the architect of the removal policy: that ostensibly “final solution” to the U.S. “Indian problem.” Those interested in Jefferson's career as an early American ethnologist and practitioner of scientific inquiry into Native American culture will find much to contemplate in this book. Wallace provides, in Chapters 3–5, a compelling study of the ways in which Jefferson's “mordant fascination with the image of the Indian as a conquered and dying race” affected his scholarship. Tying together the various strands of Jefferson's interest in Indians, Wallace documents a series of misrepresentations, falsifications of evidence, and silences in a variety of Jefferson's publications and private writings on Native peoples that all served to justify his own interests in land speculation, national territorial expansion, and, ultimately, the entire program of imposing “civilization” on Indian “savages” that received pivotal emphasis during his presidency.The remainder of the book traces the process by which attitudes originally formed during Jefferson's early academic inquiry into Native history were reinforced by his experiences in national office after 1790 and eventually translated into national policy. Wallace breaks down the essence of Jefferson's Indian policy into seven key elements . Essentially, these involved Jefferson's reliance on the legal authority and administrative mechanisms of the Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts, as well as the presidential power to enter into treaties, to secure Indian land for the future expansion of the white American population while simultaneously seeking to assimilate Native peoples into that population as “civilized” farmers.If Wallace is occasionally prone to indulge in educated guesses about facts, people, or events that Jefferson “must have been” familiar with, if some of his secondary sources are not the most up to date, and if his concluding discussion of Jefferson's legacy is disappointingly brief, he has nevertheless produced a monograph that deserves wide readership and discussion. The consequences of Jefferson's policies, as Wallace explains, are visible today in the bitter struggle Native Americans are currently waging to restore sovereign identities and reclaim lost lands. Yet, as we learn from Wallace, Jefferson has also cast a long shadow in an intellectual sense, insofar as contemporary academic inquiry into American Indian history and culture all too often reflects the values and interests of the dominant culture and fails to seek input or criticism from its Native “subjects.” In seeking improvement in relations between Americans and Native Americans, so long distorted by the paradoxically romantic and racist perception of Indian culture bequeathed by Jefferson and others, we might benefit from shifting our agenda to finding ways to study with Native peoples, rather than remaining content with simply more studies of them. (shrink)

Rescher's introduction combines interesting and salient material on the sources of this work and the study of logic in al-Fârâbî's time. The translation has marginal page and line references to the Arabic text.--C. E. B.

Rousseau considered the Émile to be the most important of all his writings and thought it would be the one to seal his reputation as a thinker. It is not that the Émile is different in any fundamental respect from his other writings, for Rousseau insisted that however the subject might vary he always wrote according to the same principles. No, it is simply that Rousseau develops his basic argument more clearly and at greater length in this, his last substantive (...) work explicitly intended for the public. As Rousseau would have it, this work shows most clearly that man is good by nature, that he is naturally attracted to justice as well as order, that both vice and error are foreign to his original make-up, that they arose only because of society, and that the ills from which man now suffers because of the poor organization of society can be mitigated. These and many other intriguing lines of thought are developed in the Émile as Rousseau pursues his declared goal of explaining how to raise a youth according to nature. Yet until now the subtlety, not to mention the simple formal structure, of Rousseau’s treatise has not been accessible to the English-reading public. With this new translation of the Émile, Allan Bloom has made it possible for those who read only English to encounter Rousseau on his own terms. (shrink)

The Emergence of Israel in the Twelfth and Eleventh Centuries B.C.E. By Volkmar Fritz, translated by James W. Barker. Biblical Encyclopedia, vol. 2. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011. Pp. xviii + 268. $32.95.

Bacteria use trans‐translation to rescue stalled ribosomes and target incomplete proteins for proteolysis. Despite similarities between tRNAs and transfer‐messenger RNA (tmRNA), the key molecule for trans‐translation, new structural and biochemical data show important differences between translation and trans‐translation at most steps of the pathways. tmRNA and its binding partner, SmpB, bind in the A site of the ribosome but do not trigger the same movements of nucleotides in the rRNA that are required for codon recognition by tRNA. tmRNA‐SmpB moves from (...) the A site to the P site of the ribosome without subunit rotation to generate hybrid states, and moves from the P site to a site outside the ribosome instead of to the E site. During catalysis, transpeptidation to tmRNA appears to require the ribosomal protein bL27, which is dispensable for translation, suggesting that this protein may be conserved in bacteria due to trans‐translation. These differences provide insights into the fundamental nature of trans‐translation, and provide targets for new antibiotics that may have decrease cross‐reactivity with eukaryotic ribosomes. (shrink)

Technology has advanced significantly over the past decades. Significant changes have occurred in the field of translation with the development of programs such as Google.translate and Yandex.translator. The presented applications are already being actively implemented in translation agencies to optimize translation activities, where written translations of documents, articles, annotations, etc. must be provided to customers as quick as possible. While working with popular science text, online programs help translators gain time, but this requires to edit the text. The artistic (...) style requires more concentration and dedication, because. the means of expression presented in it require taking into account the context and nuances of the use of certain units of language. Machine translation has the potential to become an indispensable assistant in the hands of a translator. This article discusses machine translation of expressive means, namely metaphors. The study is illustrated with examples and a comparative analysis of the translation of metaphorical units is carried out, the classification of metaphors is identified and an analysis is carried out with which means of expression the translator is able to cope with. The difficulties of translating metaphors are analyzed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 122.3 (2001) 445-447 [Access article in PDF] Ian Kidd, ed. and trans. Posidonius. Vol. 3: The Translation of the Fragments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 414 pp. Cloth, £50.00. The third volume of Kidd's Posidonius is billed as a translation, but it is much more than that. It is the capstone of the edition, the culmination of a lifetime of work, and the most useful (...) entrée into Posidonius' life, writings, and thought.Posidonius of Apamea, the respected Stoic philosopher of the late second and early first century B.C., and a voluminous author in an extraordinary number of fields of learning, suffered a strange fate at the hand of modern scholars. His writings, like those of many other ancient writers, were lost; and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the references to other lost authors were being carefully culled from surviving ancient literature and collected into critical editions of "fragments," Posidonius was largely overlooked. F. Jacoby collected references to his historical and geographical works (1926), but no one paid the same attention to his philosophical writings. Instead, a search for supposed echoes and adaptations in authors who knew, or may have known, him produced a stream of tantalizing but contradictory constructs. This continued even after J. F. Dobson sounded the alarm in 1918 about a growing "Posidonius myth." In 1936 Ludwig Edelstein attempted to halt what he regarded as ungrounded speculation by outlining what can be known from references in which Posidonius is explicitly named. He subsequently began collecting such references for publication. When Edelstein died twenty-nine years later with the task still unfinished, Ian Kidd was asked to complete the job. This he did, in what has become a monumental three-volume work, running to over eighteen hundred pages. It began with a complete edition of testimonia and fragments in 1972 (volume 1), followed by a commentary of nearly one thousand pages in 1988 (volume 2), and now finally a translation. Though it is, technically speaking, the third volume in the series, it is the best place for most readers to begin their study of Posidonius.The volume opens with a lucid summary of Posidonius' life and thought, one of the best in English. Kidd originally wrote it for a German handbook, Philosophen der Antike, volume 2 (ed. F. Ricken, Stuttgart, 1996), and now makes it available in English translation. The translations of the fragments and testimonia are accurate and highly readable, as we have come to expect from Kidd. Both scholars and Greekless readers will welcome them, because many of the sources are unfamiliar and some have never been translated into English or are difficult to interpret. Kidd's translation embodies the considered judgment of someone who has immersed himself in the texts of Posidonius for more than thirty years. Finally, each text is prefaced by an account of the context in which the reference occurs and an assessment of the extent, content, and historical background of its embedded Posidonian material.It is this ensemble of introductory survey, prefaces, and translations that makes the volume so useful. Fragments, whether they are quotations, paraphrases, [End Page 445] or interpretations (friendly or hostile), have no meaning except within an interpretive context. For each such fragment it is now recognized that there are two primary contexts: the text and creative imagination of the lost author who inspired it, and the text and imagination of the extant author who refers to that now lost text. When Edelstein began collecting the so-called fragments, the collection that Kidd completed in 1972, the goal of any collection of fragments was to reveal something about the first of the two contexts, namely, the text and thought of the lost author. The typical strategy was to extract the lost author's text (or at least his ideas) from the quoting author's text, in which it was presumably embedded, discarding all portions of text except those expressly attributed to the lost author. Since then it has become evident, as Kidd noted in volume 2 (ix... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When an Arab Laughs in Toledo: Cervantes’s Interpellation of Early Modern Spanish OrientalismE. C. Graf (bio)My purpose has been to place in the plaza of our republic a game table which everyone can approach to entertain themselves without fear of being harmed by the rods; by which I mean without harm to spirit or body, because honest and agreeable exercises are always more likely to do good than harm.—Miguel (...) de Cervantes Saavedra, Prologue to Novelas ejemplares [my translation]We are engaged in a technical enterprise at the species scale.—Jacques Lacan, “L’agressivité en psychanalyse” [my translation]While I was all intent on watching him, he looked at me, and with his hands he spread his chest and said: “See how I split myself!”!—Dante Alighieri, Inferno 28.28–30 Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Sandro Botticelli, The Virgin and Child (c. 1490). Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; ©1999 President and Fellows of Harvard College. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Salvador Dalí, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate One Second Before Awakening (1941). Courtesy of Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; ©1999 Artists' Rights Society (ARS), New York.For much of this century, Hispanists have labored in an effort to elevate Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605, 1615) to the coveted status of the “first modern novel.” Today this kind of criticism may strike our postmodern sensibilities as a rather traditional enterprise, the kind more interested in establishing an elite hierarchy of literary tastes than in saying anything new about an author or text. For many, the study of literature is still an aesthetic beauty pageant in which “great books” like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767) or Marie de la Vergne de La Fayette’s La princesse de Clèves (1678) are paraded across the stage in a contest to seduce the Western intelligentsia. 1 The postmodern student of literature may not have much concern for this age-old territorial contest, but she might be interested to learn that the fallout from Hispanism’s quest for the “first modern novel” has involved so much attention to, indeed complication of, Don Quixote, that the book now resembles more a postmodern text than an early modern one. At the turn of the century, we have been left with what Jorge Luis Borges would recognize as an “aleph”: an infinite ideological labyrinth that reflects and/or cannibalizes all forms, thereby escaping all attempts [End Page 68] to describe it. 2 Whatever we currently mean by “Cervantes” (an author, a collection of texts, an ideological construction, and so forth) carries with it an impressive range of critical responses. Cervantes has been labeled converso (Castro, Canavaggio), Christian humanist (Castro, Bataillon, Forcione, Herrero, Vilanova), disillusioned secularist (Lukács, Cascardi), precapitalist (Johnson), anti-essentialist (Wilson), anti-Eusebian (Presberg), Menippean (Bakhtin), feminist (El Saffar, Rabin, Cruz), sadist (Nabokov), ethnocentric imperialist (Mariscal), medieval (Gorfkle), homophobic (Martín), non-organicist Aristotelian (Read), and either discursively or actually homosexual (Combet, Rossi, Smith, Arrabal). This list is nowhere near complete, but the reader will grasp the robust effects of the plurality of perspectives on Cervantes.Each of these interpretations is valid to varying degrees within various contexts, but at present I am interested in reading Cervantes as the author of a multicultural manifesto on behalf of the Moriscos of Southern Spain. 3 Within the contexts of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and Palestinian postcolonial literary critic Edward Said, materialist, postcolonial, and multicultural critiques of various forms of power and their ideologies can be seen as the fundamental propositions of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. 4 Cervantes’s ultimate orientation may perhaps be inescapably Eurocentric, but his responses to the European experience of the rise and expansion of an ethnocentric militaristic nation state are relatively centrifugal when compared to the attitudes of many of his contemporaries.In surveying some of the antihegemonic details of Cervantes’s novel, I am also interested in dispelling the popular myth of Don Quixote. Especially in the English-speaking world, and particularly in the United States, Don Quixote remains captive to a... (shrink)

The _Mozi_ is a key philosophical work written by a major social and political thinker of the fifth century B.C.E. It is one of the few texts to survive the Warring States period and is crucial to understanding the origins of Chinese philosophy and two other foundational works, the _Mengzi_ and the _Xunzi_. Ian Johnston provides an English translation of the entire _Mozi_, as well as the first bilingual edition in any European language to be published in the West. His (...) careful translation reasserts the significance of the text's central doctrines, and his annotations and contextual explanations add vivid historical and interpretive dimensions. Part 1 of the _Mozi_ is called the "Epitomes" and contains seven short essays on the elements of Mohist doctrine. Part 2, the "Core Doctrines," establishes the ten central tenets of Mo Zi's ethical, social, and political philosophy, while articulating his opposition to Confucianism. Part 3, the "Canons and Explanations," comprises observations on logic, language, disputation, ethics, science, and other matters, written particularly in defense of Mohism. Part 4, the "Dialogues," presents lively conversations between Master Mo and various disciples, philosophical opponents, and potential patrons. Part 5, the "Defense Chapters," details the principles and practices of defensive warfare, a subject on which Master Mo was an acknowledged authority. Now available to English-speaking readers of all backgrounds, the Mozi is a rich and varied text, and this bilingual edition provides an excellent tool for learning classical Chinese. (shrink)

BackgroundCurrent policies regulating the use of animals for scientific purposes are based on balancing between potential gain of knowledge and suffering of animals used in experimentation. The balancing process is complicated, on the one hand by plurality of views on our duties towards animals, and on the other hand by more recent discussions on uncertainty in the probability of reaching the final aim of the research and problems of translational failure.MethodsThe study combines ethical analysis based on a literature review with (...) neuropsychiatry-related preclinical research as a case study.ResultsBased on the analysis and the case study we show that neuropsychiatry-related preclinical research is an especially interesting case from an ethical perspective. The 3R principles are used to minimize the negative consequences for the animals used in research. However, neuropsychiatric research is characterized by specific challenges in assessing the probability of success of reaching the final aim, due to our limited mechanistic knowledge of human neuropsychiatric illness. Consequently, the translational value of the currently used animal models may be difficult to prove, which undermines the validity of these models and complicated the ethical assessment.ConclusionsWe conclude that a combined approach that deals with both science and the ethical dimensions is necessary to address the problems of validity and translation in neuropsychiatry-related preclinical research. We suggest this approach to comprise first, improved experimental methods, e.g. by using systematic reviews, second, a more patients-based approach that leads to models that reflect interindividual variation better, and third, more interdisciplinary cooperation. (shrink)

The influence of age and formal education on the development of moral reasoning in a Spanish sample of students was assessed by using a Spanish translation of Rest's Defining Issues Test. Our results support the hypothesis that moral development is highly related to both variables in our cultural context, although more so with formal education than with age.

ICAP is a theory of active learning that differentiates students’ engagement based on their behaviors. ICAP postulates that Interactive engagement, demonstrated by co‐generative collaborative behaviors, is superior for learning to Constructive engagement, indicated by generative behaviors. Both kinds of engagement exceed the benefits of Active or Passive engagement, marked by manipulative and attentive behaviors, respectively. This paper discusses a 5‐year project that attempted to translate ICAP into a theory of instruction using five successive measures: (a) teachers’ understanding of ICAP after (...) completing an online module, (b) their success at designing lesson plans using different ICAP modes, (c) fidelity of teachers’ classroom implementation, (d) modes of students’ enacted behaviors, and (e) students’ learning outcomes. Although teachers had minimal success in designing Constructive and Interactive activities, students nevertheless learned significantly more in the context of Constructive than Active activities. We discuss reasons for teachers’ overall difficulty in designing and eliciting Interactive engagement. (shrink)

For all of the emphasis on quality improvement—as well as the acknowledged overlap between assessment of the quality of healthcare services and clinical ethics—the quality of clinical ethics consultation has received scant attention, especially in terms of empirical measurement. Recognizing this need, the second edition of Core Competencies for Health Care Ethics Consultation identified four domains of ethics quality: (1) ethicality, (2) stakeholders’ satisfaction, (3) resolution of the presenting conflict/dilemma, and (4) education that translates into knowledge. This study is the (...) first, to our knowledge, to directly measure all of these domains. Here we describe the quality improvement process undertaken at a tertiary care academic medical center, as well as the tools developed to measure the quality of ethics consultation, which include post-consultation satisfaction surveys and weekly case conferences. The information gained through these tools helps to improve not only the process of ethics consultation, but also the measurement and assurance of quality. (shrink)

This early study is a key work, along with several other preliminary essays, for understanding the genesis of Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Well translated and with an excellent introduction and notes, the book contains the critical thesis that former theories of the imagination confused perception with imagination, and that imagination was properly recognized first by Husserl and was subsequently further clarified by Sartre in his notion of the nihilating consciousness. --E. S. C.