And Hegel likewise has high praise for the translation of Homer into German by J.H. Voss:
"Luther made the Bible and you have made Homer speak German. This is the greatest gift that can be given to a people; for a people remains barbaric and fails to see the excellence it knows as its own true property as long as it does not come to know it in its own language. If you want to forget these two examples, I still want to say of my own efforts that I will try to teach philosophy to speak German. If it ultimately comes to do that, then it will be infinitely more difficult to give triviality the appearance of profound speech".
"Luther made the Bible and you have made Homer speak German. This is the greatest gift that can be given to a people; for a people remains barbaric and fails to see the excellence it knows as its own true property as long as it does not come to know it in its own language. If you want to forget these two examples, I still want to say of my own efforts that I will try to teach philosophy to speak German. If it ultimately comes to do that, then it will be infinitely more difficult to give triviality the appearance of profound speech".
- Hegel, ‘Letter to Johann Heinrich Voss’, 1805.