Pese a que la parte relacionada con la verdad y lo bello en el discurso creo que no queda bien hilada con el resto del libro, las partes sobre la reminiscencia del alma son extremadamente bellas. Incluso a mí me han salido alas leyéndolas

Phaedrus is about relationships between friends and lovers. It's also a case study in rhetoric. It even delves into the nature of philosophy.

I suspect that there is no way of translating it so that it's easy to approach for the reader with little idea of what Plato was about. It's probably a difficult text to translate at all. The introduction to the translation I read certainly hints that this is the case.

There are so many barriers between a modern-day reader and a text like this. Even someone as familiar with it and its context as Christopher Rowe, translator of the Penguin version, can't understand all the allusions and idioms it contains and he doesn't have the space to explain all the ones he does. His notes can't tell us everything about living in Plato's time in Plato's city. He can't provide a complete background to the discussion in terms of the history of philosophy or what other philosophers were saying at the same time. Some of the plays and poems Plato references have been lost and a summary of the ones that are extant would probably be longer than the discussion between the two men. Even the book's setting of Socrates and Phaedrus meeting up and going for an early morning walk to discuss a speech written by someone else has meaning that's not obvious to a casual reader like me.

My two stars say more about my inability to connect with the text than it does about the text itself. As a book, Phaedrus is very short, but it's a very dense, and difficult, read for the uninitiated.

وقتی چشمانش به چشمان معشوق می‌افتد٫ لرزش بدنش به گرمایی سوزاننده تبدیل می‌شود. بخشی از روح که محل رشد بال‌هاست اما در طول زندگی زمینی خشک و چروکیده شده٫ شروع به ذوب شدن می‌کند و دوباره بال‌های کوچکی از آن جوانه می‌زند:
«همانند کودکی که دندان‌هایش تازه جوانه زده و لثه‌هایش می‌خارد و درد می‌گیرد، وقتی بال‌ها جوانه می‌زنند روح متورم می‌شود، درد می‌گیرد و می‌سوزد.»