In our upcoming October gathering, we will discuss Jorge Luis Borges's playful and profound story, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," which details a French poet who recreates Cervantes's novel word for word, generating a text that is syntactically identical but semantically completely different. To prepare for this discussion, it is helpful to look at the history of translation and duplication in the ancient world.
In the third century BC, according to legend, seventy-two Jewish scholars were brought to Alexandria to translate the Hebrew Torah into Greek—a translation known as the Septuagint. The translators were isolated in separate rooms. When they finished, their translations coincided word for word, down to the smallest grammatical choice. In the ancient world, this identical alignment was treated as proof of divine inspiration. Yet, as the Septuagint circulated throughout the Greek-speaking Roman Empire, the meaning of its words began to shift. Terms like nomos (which the translators used for the Hebrew Torah, meaning instruction or teaching) carried heavy Greek legalistic and political connotations. The readers of Alexandria read a different text than the writers of Jerusalem, even though the words matched perfectly. The copy was not the original.
This history shows that a text is not a static block of copper. It is a live signal that changes depending on the impedance of the receiving circuit. When a modern reader, lawyer, or judge reads a text written in the past, they cannot act as a passive mirror. They bring their entire historical environment to the reading, translating the words through the lens of all that has happened since. The search for "original public meaning" is a Menardian illusion; we are always rewriting the Constitution or the classic novel as we read it, because we cannot unlearn the history that has structured our minds.
This October, we will discuss how to live with this translation barrier. We will explore how acknowledging the relational nature of meaning can help us read old texts with greater analytical realism, abandoning the naive search for static intent and embracing the active, creative work of reading in the present.