Carney at Davos

With regret at how long it has been since I’ve posted on here:

A couple of months ago, I set myself an experiment: to render Mark Carney’s January 2026 address to the World Economic Forum — a speech about the breakdown of the postwar order and the agency still left to middle powers — into Demosthenic Greek, with a Ciceronian Latin exordium and a parallel version of the framing essay in Psellan, Byzantine Greek.

The interest, for readers of this blog, is not of course the politics. It is what a modern argument does when you force it into the register of a fourth century BC language — where the periods have to balance, where the abstractions of contract and sovereignty have to find fourth-century equivalents or else get paraphrased away, and where the ear expects an antithesis the modern sentence never supplied. That is a register problem before it is a translation problem, and it is the kind of thing this blog has always been about.

The rendering was made in often Socratic collaboration with an AI (Claude); the site surfaces, in full apparatus, the editorial decisions behind it — including where the machine’s instinct for register was right, where it was confidently wrong, and what the whole exercise turned out to reveal about doing this kind of work with a machine at the desk. The experiment has been as much about what AI is, and what AI brings to such a translation enterprise, as it is about the enterprise itself.

The full text, with commentary, is at carneyatdavos.opoudjis.net.