The Art of Footnotes

Today's entry will seem a light and summery dish compared with the heavy food for thought that I usually post. For this I make no apologies. It is a relief to post something (for once) that won't require days and days of contemplation to piece together.

For a Political Thought class that I'm taking this semester, one of the required reading books is The Republic of Plato. The copy that I purchased is a very nice edition translated by Allan Bloom. He writes a very well thought out introductory essay and interpretive essay.

In the introduction, Bloom mentions that he has many things to add about the dialogue, but consigns them all to footnotes and the interpretive essay. I agree with him on this point, the translation should in no way be affected by the translator's personal thoughts or opinions.

So, excited for what promises to be a good reading, I flipped to Book I of the Republic itself. Trouble. Apparently Mr. Bloom has a lot of thoughts. Enough that Book I alone has 45 footnotes, mostly concentrated to towards the first ten pages or so of the book. This in itself isn't a problem, I appreciate the fact that Bloom is taking such care to make his translation transparent. The trouble lies in where he PUTS these footnotes. At the back of the book. I had to flip to the back of the book three times before the first sentence was complete. Needless to say, this makes it difficult to follow the overall arc of what's going on in the dialogue. Sort of an extreme case of not being able to see the forest for the trees.

Personally, I think he should have adopted the footnote style of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 'Gulag Archipelago' (or at least, the edition that I read. I'll re-update with WHICH edition and publisher I read once I look it up). All of the footnotes (and there are a lot, and they are very lengthy) can be found on the bottom of each page. Sometimes this means that there is very little of the actual text on the page, but it allows you to read or at least skim over the notes without having to flip away from the page you're reading from.

I suppose for the casual reader who may want to avoid any extra reading, this system of placing the footnotes in the middle of the text would be a potential annoyance. However, Bloom specifically states in his introduction that Plato is a difficult work at best, and that his translation is aimed to be most useful for 'serious scholars'.