Translator
Ian Johnston
“My real forte, if I have one, is not so much a superior command of the original language as an ability to find the appropriate English style for a particular author.”
Ian C. Johnston was born in Valparaiso, Chile, and educated at McGill University (BSc, Geology and Chemistry, 1959), the University of Bristol (BA, English and Greek, 1968), and the University of Toronto (MA, English, 1969). In addition he holds certificates from the Ontario College of Education, Heidelberg University, and the Jarvis School of Welding.
His teaching career included Upper Canada College (1959–60), Port Perry High School (1961–63), the University of British Columbia (1969–70), the College of New Caledonia in Prince George (1970–75), and Malaspina College / Malaspina University-College in Nanaimo (1975–2004). He taught Science, Mathematics, Latin, English, Classics, and Liberal Studies (Great Books).
Johnston is the author of The Ironies of War: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad (University of America Press, 1987) and wrote and produced a number of satirical musical revues for a theatre company he organized, the Yes Mac Players.
He developed and maintains the web site Johnstonia, a resource for teachers, students, and general readers, which has had over 11 million visitors since its inception. The site contains lectures on Great Books, handbooks on grammar, statistics, essay writing, and the history of science, many translations from Greek, French, German, and Latin, book reviews, and essays. These materials are freely available to anyone who wishes to download them other than for commercial book publication.
Professor Johnston has had over 25 titles released in the last several years, including The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Oresteia, Antigone, Oedipus the King, Philoctetes, Ajax, Bacchae, Medea, Birds, Clouds, Frogs, Lysistrata, Knights, Peace, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, Birth of Tragedy, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Kant’s Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, Descartes’ Discourse on Methods, Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, and the Metamorphosis and other short stories of Kafka. He is currently retired as a university-college instructor and lives in Nanaimo, British Columbia, with his wife.
Further reading