You guys have opened up a big old can of worms.

All right, you've really done it now.

Welcome back to Words, Words. This is my

occasional series that I do on Fridays. Tuesdays we release our usual Young

Heritage episodes, The Classical classical education you never knew you were missing.

It's an hour each week about some classic text or work from the Western canon that can help us think through modern problems and

then on Fridays I like to reach out and talk to folks out in the world do interviews

but I also like to take your questions about translation. I started doing this this year because I was getting a bunch of questions about how to pick good translations, what translation even involves and how to read books that were originally written in a different language.

And I wanted a space to just kind of talk through some of that stuff with you because it's my pet obsession.

It's one of my favorite things to think and talk about.

And I now have, it turns out, a big old backlog of questions.

You guys are really interested in this subject and you've got lots of stuff to ask, which is phenomenal.

Please keep them coming. I'm really am paying attention to

them I promise and I'm gonna sort through them as we go but each of them raises at

this huge kind of cloud of issues that are really to me fascinating and they're about much more than

language or maybe it's better to say that the subject of language goes much deeper than we typically think.

We imagine that this is just one aspect of our experience.

It's the words we say to each other or write on a page.

But actually our linguistic nature as creatures goes much deeper into our bones and under the skin

than we typically think and so when we start to think about how to get behind the words that we say

underneath the particular syllables or sounds that we write and speak and under into the underlying meaning, then we have to start thinking about really what's the nature of this whole human enterprise that we're doing.

So it's an endlessly rich topic and today I have a question that really opens up that set of issues yet again in a really profound way.

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