ABSTRACT
If we take at face value Walter Benjamin’s famous conclusion that “The interlinear version […] is the archetype or ideal of all translation” (2006, 307), then a translation, any translation, is a sort of prolonged annotation. In the century-old Loeb Classical Library series, which will serve here as an archetype or ideal of the relationship between translation and textual scholarship in the Anglophone world, the original Greek or Latin is on the left-hand page with its translation on the facing page and the footnotes (always resolutely sparse) positioned beneath both original and translation. James Loeb’s purpose, set forth in a statement published in the series’ earliest volumes and now on its Web site, was to “make the philosophy and wit of the writers of ancient Greece and Rome once more accessible by means of translations that are in themselves real pieces of literature […] and not dull transcripts […] and to place side by side with these translations the best critical texts of the original works” (Harvard University Press n.d.).
