Hegesippus, translated from Latin into English (2005). Translator's introduction

HEGESIPPUS, TRANSLATED FROM LATIN INTO ENGLISH

[Translated by Wade Blocker, wblocker@nmol.com]

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSLATION

It should be kept in mind that the translator is not a professional Latin scholar; Latin is a hobby for him, and therefore it should be no surprise if a reader finds errors or points of disagreement with what the translator offers. The translator is a professional physicist, now retired from a career mostly spent in the aerospace industry, with a Ph. D. in Physics received from the University of California, Berkeley, California, in 1952, where he worked under the direction of Edwin MacMillan, a Nobel prize laureate in Physics, and Wolfgang Panofsky, later Director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator facility at Stanford University.

The translator assumes that any reader has some familiarity with Hegesippus, and therefore does not offer any discussion of the origin and nature of the work.

Although I have labeled the following work as a "translation" of Hegesippus it was not made for the purpose of stating in good English what is stated in Latin in Hegesippus. Rather the purpose has been to assist the translator in understanding what the Latin says as Latin without any translation into English. This translation was made mainly to serve as a prop to the translator's memory of the meaning of the Latin words, obviating the need for too frequent resort to a dictionary. To the extent possible without causing absolute confusion in the English, the Latin sentence structure, word order, and phrasing have been followed. Therefore the Latin ablative absolute construction in almost all occurrences, for example, has been translated literally and not rephrased into how the thought would normally be expressed in English. The same has been done for the Latin infinitive with two accusative substantives, one equivalent to a subject and one to an object of the infinitive, where in many cases we must use context or knowledge of the situation under discussion to tell us which is which. Since the purpose of the translation is to be an aid to understanding the Latin, the translation is as close to literal as the translator can keep it without doing too much violence to standard English grammar and usage.

Bold Roman numerals in the translation followed by a period are the chapter numbers in Ussani's Latin text. Bold Arabic numbers in brackets indicate the page in Ussani's Latin text that is being translated.

The single item of most assistance to the translator in making the translation was William Whitaker's computerized dictionary of the Latin language, which can be found online and downloaded from the Internet

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