Lucian: Selected Dialogues (Oxford World's Classics)

Discrediting Syria of her Lucian Lucian: Selected Dialogues (Oxford World's Classics) I have read this translation and I was shocked by its unfair and biased attitude that the translator imposed on Lucian himself and his literary career. I could not but notice the intended overlooking on the well-established facts about the writer and his writings. Lucian himself introduced himself unequivocally as "Syrian" and talked of his native language, Syriac, as a foreign tongue to Greek, but the translator insisted on ignoring all these facts and even in the content of the book ignored a good lucid reference to a giant masterpiece work De Dea Syria, or The Syrian Goddess. In the first lines of his introduction to the book, the translator structured these lines in a way to discredit Syria of Lucian and Lucian of his Homeland: Syria.As a university professor and as a Syrian teaching in the United States, I decry this attitude of the translator and in a way I equated it to those who decapitated the bust of the Syrian ancient poet and philosopher, Abu al-Ala al-Maari. Just because Al-Maari was a deist and not a Moslem his bust was decapitated and just because the translator seems not to like Syria, he deprived her from her Lucian.Riad Matqualoon.

Terrific source material.

Excellent book, excellent delivery

Translation is very readable. Nice edition.

I am very happy to have purchased this book. The translation has a dreamy quality that sounds wonderful to my ears as if I were hearing the Greek myths.The tales selected here are very entertaining. I never thought the author himself influences so many writers in the ages to come such as Erasmus for his Praise of Folly which is greatly influenced in style by the first tale Praise of the Fly. Very witty and sharp! The most remarkable of course is Lucien's attack on the high tales of travellers' and even early historians such as Herodotus. In A True History, Lucien weaves a most wonderful interstellar war between the kingdom of the moon and that of the sun, with outer space distance greatly shortened by the invisible webs spun by giant spiders. Probably at the time it is treated as nonsense but it has a very strong claim to be the first work of science fiction.But it is rather curious that the Oxford University Press does not print the editor's name in full. This is really the first time for my reading experience an editor on the front page bears no first name at all. I am very much interested in what C. D. N. Coasta has written and published but it has taken me some time to find out: Charles Desmond Nuttall Costa.

Excellent