DSW, #136
G. D. H. Cole, Fabian, Guild Socialist and (with Margaret Cole) author of detective fiction, born 1889, died 15 January 1959.
G. D. H. Cole, Fabian, Guild Socialist and (with Margaret Cole) author of detective fiction, born 1889, died 15 January 1959.
Alan Bennett’s diary for 1984 tells, as you and your readers may know fine well, of Alan Tyson, a fellow of All Souls, deputed to take Mrs Thatcher round the Common Room. His plan was to stop in front of the portrait of Cole and say ‘And this is G DH Dole’, hoping for her then to say ‘Cole not Dole.’ Alas, apparently he didn’t carry out the plan.
↓ Quote | Posted 15 January, 2007, 6:41 pmYes: we’ve had this anecdote at the Stoa before.
↓ Quote | Posted 15 January, 2007, 7:43 pmI’ve just bought & am reading Cole’s 7 Vol History of Socialist Thought. Very good it is too. I got it second hand which is as well as the recent Palgrave re-print is going for nearly a thousand quid.
↓ Quote | Posted 16 January, 2007, 9:56 amI use Cole’s translation of Rousseau’s Discourses and The Social Contract. Cole turned Rousseau’s French into readable English. If the translation is still up to today’s standards I don’t know.
By the way what is your opinion on reading political thinkers in translation?
My own teachers used to make great brouhaha over our using translations of French and (sometimes) German texts but suddenly seemed to have forgotten all about their objections to translations when it came to reading Kierkegaard in a language other than Danish (”Kierkegaard spoke German very well”, I recall one saying).
↓ Quote | Posted 18 January, 2007, 12:49 pmOn translations — if they’re pretty good, I’m all in favour. I mean, if you can read the original language comfortably, then it usually makes sense to use the original text, pretty obviously enough. But most Politics students these days can’t read foreign languages especially well, and they’ll probably get more out of a decent translation than out of picking their way through a text in a language they only half understand.
I quite like Cole’s Social Contract translation, too (though the translation I use for day to day stuff is the more recent Gourevitch one in the Cambridge blue-books series). When I teach classes on Rousseau, I quite like it if we have half a dozen different translations in the room, so that if someone’s interpretation isn’t borne out by someone else’s translation, and if something interesting seems to be at stake, then we can check back against the original French text — and that’s quite a good way of *showing* students some of the issues that arise when using translations of classic works.
I have no opinions about translations of Kierkegaard. I’ve hardly read any Kierkegaard — just Fear & Trembling, in (I think) the Penguin translation. (I don’t read Danish, either.)
↓ Quote | Posted 20 January, 2007, 1:24 pm