'Hoc ego supersedi vertere'. Untranslatability and Hesitation to Translate in the Work of Aulus Gelllius

The paper builds on four factors of “untranslatability”: insufficient understanding of the term in the source language, excessive deference to the source language, lack of effort in cultural adaptation, and an overly targetoriented approach. The purpose of this paper is to show that each of these phenomena can be found in the practices of Latin authors who translated from Greek. Examples drawn from Gellius’ Noctes Atticae are presented to demonstrate this thesis.