Of course this continuum of authentic language, previously applied to your grandfather, also applies to other uses of language. We sometimes want to express and receive the truth from real people who are dead, but more distantly related to us genetically, spatially, or temporally than our own grandfathers. We can achieve  this sort of communication by reading great books. And if we apply our authentic language continuum to great books, the following analogies emerge. Reading Grandpa’s letter is like reading Seneca, Augustine, or Newton in his original language. Aunt Sally’s recollections are like a professor’s lecture, a textbook chapter, or, at best, a dynamic or poetic translation of them; even when wonderful to behold, they are not the genuine article. The results of the software-generated translation of the letter are like a rigidly and relentlessly literal translation of a classic. And the A.I. grief bot is something like a medium pretending to channel the spirit of Seneca for a student who fancies this an effective alternative to doing his homework.

Let us now turn to my second potentially controversial claim: the philosophical, religious, and otherwise literary traditions of Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman civilization are the intellectual and spiritual progenitors of the best of our own culture, and therefore the sources of our great books. They should be dear to us, for they are the grandfathers of our cultural family.  Some of them are French, many of them Greek, many more Latin. Reading an epistle from Seneca, the autobiography of St. Augustine, or a treatise by Newton is to the life of the mind what the letter from M. Grand-Père is to the life of the family. If you were given the opportunity to read it, and I mean really read it, without recourse to a summary, translation, or a relative’s recollections of it, why would you not? The point could be put more finely: would you rather be the person who insists on reading your grandfather’s letter yourself, or the person who, when given the opportunity to read it, instead asks Aunt Sally to give you the gist of it or perhaps just Googles Grandpa’s obituary?

To be fair to anyone who does not have an immediate and decisive answer to that question, let me complicate the picture once more. We have already agreed that your grandfather was French and that he never spoke or wrote in English; what if you could not read French? Surely, then, no one would blame you for wishing you could read his last letter, while thinking that the Sally summary or Google Translate might have to suffice. But what if you were a student in school who loved novels, and, instead of agonizing over whether filial piety demanded the slow acquisition of French, you consulted with Sally, who encouraged you to learn a new language. What if she told you that another school across town offered free introductory French lessons, that people all over the world gathered regularly to use the language and thus accelerate their acquisition of it, and that making the effort would allow you to read not only Grandpa’s letter, but also many of the best novels written during the past three hundred years? Why would you not make the attempt?

Similar virtues and opportunities attend the study of the Latin language, but, in the latter case, Sally’s arguments become even more convincing. Classical charter schools that teach Latin as a matter of course and at no charge to students and their families are proliferating in this country. Online tutors and communities of Latin speakers have never been more prevalent. Finally, forget three hundred years: learning Latin gives one unmediated access to literature that spans at least nineteen hundred years by conservative accounts and includes what many would argue are the most important of European writings. If you set out to read Seneca, you can also discover Augustine. If you want to read Cicero, you can later delight in Erasmus. If you are inspired to read Boethius, you can be edified by Thomas Aquinas. If your heart longs to read Vergil, your soul can sing along with centuries of Christian hymns, many of which remain in active, liturgical use to this day. Unlike most languages in current use, and certainly unlike any other European language (pace Greek, but dialectical diversity at the beginning of its history and the Dimotiki-Katharevousa debate in modern times have no Latin parallel, at least after Charlemagne), Latin just is Latin, and it is fundamentally intelligible, whether a given author wrote in the first century B.C. or the fifteenth century A.D.

Instead of intermediaries to true experience, someone who loves language, literature, and their best expressions rightly wants the most authentic version of them, for to possess the real thing is to possess both the truth and real human community. And if the dead are dear to us, and not only the living, then they deserve to be heard, and the human heart and mind yearn to hear them in their own voice. For translation is an art, and sometimes a necessary one, but never a properly liberal one; it is always subservient to what is really great, and it is never a perfect servant.

Allow me to illustrate this last point with a quotation from Vergil’s Aeneid. At its most literal level, the poem is about the journey of the survivors of the Trojan War to Italy, where they will become the progenitors of the world-defining Roman people. At the beginning of Book I, the leader of the survivors, the titular hero, Aeneas, is sailing through the Mediterranean Sea, when a jealous goddess stirs up a storm, which, as far as he knows, destroys his entire fleet, except for his own ship. The apparent survivors, much reduced in number, wash up on the northern shore of Africa. As the leader of the group, Aeneas has the unenviable task of encouraging his men, demoralized, exhausted, grieving, and fearful, to continue their journey in an unfamiliar land, in spite of the fact that almost everyone they know seems to be dead. Aeneas delivers one of the most famous speeches in the history of literature. Two of its verses run as follows:

O passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem.
(You who have suffered weightier misfortune, Zeus will give an end to these woes also.)
                    . . .
Durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis.
(Endure, and preserve yourselves for more favorable times.)

In the first line, a literal English translation will significantly reduce the force of its hopeful tenor, since, in the Latin, the word translated as “end” comes literally at the end of the line. In addition to its place being poetically appropriate, it is also the position of second-greatest emphasis in classical Latin syntax, emphasizing the finality of the end of the survivors’ woes. It is as if Vergil, through Aeneas, were saying, “no, next time, it will really be the end of your troubles.” In the second verse, the optimistic tenor of the literal English translation belies the sorrow of the speaker. Alliteration and consonance clash and combine to produce a sequence of hardly-interrupted sibilants that nearly devolve into hissing.

It is as if Aeneas were pronouncing his message of hope and endurance while gritting his teeth, telling his men that, although they must press on, he is not insensitive to their suffering; in fact, he, too, is angry and aggrieved by their situation. Aeneas becomes, in the original Latin of the Aeneid, a sympathetic and sympathizing leader, and not merely a competent one. Only the sounds of the authentic text betray this characterization.