Sounds interesting. If any commenter would like to take on the task of rendering one of the classics of Western philosophy as rap lyrics then do feel free to use this thread. Limericks etc also welcome.

I think it’s a great idea. Bennett is right that the goal should be to understand Locke’s arguments and ideas, and—at the beginning, for undergraduates—getting up to speed in the idioms of 17th century English is an impediment to this.

You might claim that this makes the project no different from any translation, but that strikes me as disingenous. There might not be any such thing as a translation that is perfectly neutral as to various construals of the text, but there are also degrees here, and Bennett’s versions are, on this scale, quite extreme. Indeed, if you look at some of the texts he’s produced, you can see that he introduces asides that purport to explain points just made, which asides don’t correspond to anything in the original, and that he introduces linking vocabulary such as “it follows from what has just been said” that, again, aren’t present in the original. Doing this sort of thing not only prejudges such central questions as what an author meant by a certain claim or what the argumentative structure of a passage is supposed to be; the additions put the reader at a greater distance from the original data for these questions than a typical translation does.

Then there’s also a part of me that regrets the loss of the flavor of the original. This isn’t just an aesthetic point. When the texts seem like they were produced yesterday you lose the sense—basic to the development of a feel for history—of simultaneous distance from and commonality with the present.

(Verring off-topic, a bit: Pluhar’s Kant translations are themselves widely regarded as eccentric endeavors. Even so, they’re quite different from Bennett, because (1) Pluhar’s insertions are clearly marked off as such, and (2) the insertions are themselves required because Pluhar tries to a Quixotic extent to preserve the original syntax, which, without his insertions, would make for nearly unintelligible English.)

The whole issue of how a modern student is to be introduced to his/her enormous written heritage is a very vexed one nowadays, when nobody knows what a “classic” is and high school curricula give beginning tertiary students no firm foundations. I don’t know what the answer is, but I strongly believe that we need one.

Re the Pluhar: He might move clauses around and chope sentences up, but he does seem to try to leave the individual clauses themselves intact to a far greater degree than most translators. (I’m not saying that’s a good thing. It can make for very odd reading.)

This actually seems to work well enough. Last semester I (or, more precisely, the lecturer for whom I was TA-ing) spent part of an intro course giving students a few dozen pages a week of Bennett’s versions of Descartes’ Meditations and Locke’s Essay. Then in lecture the students were given summaries of the arguments from their readings, and in recitation they were asked to discuss those arguments.

The discussion was decent, and there weren’t any complaints about the obscurity of the Bennett texts, as there were with other texts such as Anselm that we read not-in-Bennett-translation.