Groucho Marx on learning Greek in old age

When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch's statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

Thoughts on bible translation

Rodney Decker's What Does a Translator Have To Offer a Reader? has some great quotes about the problems of translating. He includes of course, Traduttore traditore, the Italian proverb Translators are traitors, but also Rabbi Yehuda in the Talmud:

He who translates a verse literally is a liar,
and he who paraphrases is a blasphemer!

He also cites Cicero's words, when attempting to translate Plato from Greek to Latin:

It is hard to preserve in a translation the charm of expressions which in another language are most felicitous...
If I render word for word, the result will sound uncouth, and if compelled by necessity I alter anything in the order or wording, I shall seem to have departed from the function of a translator.