My Translation of On First Principles Was Meant to Help a Good Cause

I explained the reasons that led me to make the translation, so that it might be seen that I acted not in the spirit of contention and rivalry in which he so often acts, but from the necessity I explained above. I did it to help a good and useful undertaking. I hoped it might lend something of clearness and brightness to one who, though he had little literary training, was writing a serious work. [a]

Do we not know cases where old houses have been of use in building new ones? Sometimes a stone is taken from the remote and hidden parts of an old house to decorate the doorway of the new one and adorn its entrance. And at times a building of modern design is held up by the strength of a single ancient beam. Are we then to set ourselves against those who rightly use what is old in building what is new? Are we to say, “You may not move the materials of the old house to the new one unless you join each beam to its own beam and each stone to its own stone; unless you make a porch out of what was a porch before, and a room out of what was a room”? And this must go further still, building the most secret corners out of what were such before, and the drains out of the former drains; for every large house must have such places. That is the process of translating word for word, which in former days you considered inadmissible, but which you now approve.

But you claim that what is unlawful in itself is lawful for you, while for us you treat as a crime even what is lawful. You think it right that you should be praised for changing the words of the sacred books and divine volumes. But if we, imitating you in translating a human work, pass over anything that seems to us unedifying, we are to have no pardon from you for it, though you yourself set us the example.