Requisite Translation

So I just finished translating what our Greek professor declared “the most difficult assignment of the semester” and I feel GREAT! I was jumping around my dining room, leaping into the kitchen, the pantry, back again, high fiving the ghosts of Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, the whole gang. I felt so good that I was dancing without music. I wanted to call everybody—everybody I’ve ever loved—and tell them how good it felt. I was shocked. Pure exhilaration. I wanted to call somebody, anybody. I even tried calling a friend of mine, a fellow student and nerd, who had called earlier to ask about going to get coffee. No, swamped with work, no time for coffee, but listen to how incredible this translation was. Who knew?
If you are reading this, you’re probably thinking what I would have thought myself three months ago—which is good and normal, go with that. But from where I’m sitting, I’m no less bewildered than you: how could translating a few sentences of Aristotle be anything but drudgery? I’m telling you, if I had room in this shoebox apartment, I’d have done cartwheels, handstands, everything. This thing had been completely baffling to me and after squinting, scratching my head, scoffing, thumbing through the lexicon, the paradigms, and cursing, my eyes slowly adjusted and then I saw. I’m not saying that the translation is any good—we’ll see about that in class tonight—but I understand what the man wrote. I get it. It makes sense. I suppose it’s even beautiful, poetic, etc. And if you knew the state of my soul over the past two years, you’d even call it quite fitting, yes, even salubrious. But that wasn’t what had me jumping about like a half-drunken football fan. And that wasn’t what prompted me to write about it, either.
Without explicitly saying what, or why, I’ll tell you that I thought of calling my friend Peter, because I thought he might get a vicarious kick out of this whole thing. Also because I wanted to call him last night, but didn’t get around to it. His brother died two days ago. Brian. Diagnosed in March. Never smoked a ciggie in his life. Never mined coal. Never worked in a textile factory. Yep. Lung cancer. The most aggressive kind. No good news for seven months. Dead before he hit 35. Two young children orphaned. Wife widowed. And this isn’t the first brother Peter has lost, either. When I got the news, my heart sank and I started to cry. What the hell kind of world is this? Not to Peter. Not again. What the hell is this?
So I thought of calling him, thinking that maybe my exultation at translating four crummy Aristotelian sentences might be a bit of a consolation. I stood in the pantry, watching the red, golden green sequin leaves blown twinkling in the late autumn rays outside the window and I thought, that’s absurd. Brian is dead. This is your homework. Nobody gets it until they get it. No wonder I never liked Aristotle; I was always reading translations. But today I got it. So I’m still standing there and I stopped dead in my dance, the shivers coursing down my scalp to the neck and beyond. This is understanding. This is only a taste. Imagine the day when my questions about Peter’s brothers, the last two years, and everything meet understanding. Shivers.

Here’s the translation, which is admittedly amateurish:

In the voice, there are the signs of the sufferings in the soul, indeed [whose markings] are written in the voice. And just as not all markings are the same, neither is every voice the same. Yet [those] whose markings are primarily the same, the same are their entire sufferings of the soul. And [those] whose likeness is the same, by this time the same [also] are their deeds. (Aristotle, Περι ερμενειας (On Interpretation), 1)