As a light shining in darkness must not be set under a bush, but rather upon a candlestick so too the splendid deeds of the great must not be held back, buried in timid silence, but must be made known to listeners today, since they open virtue's door to those who follow, and in worthy memorial offer to modern eyes the example of the ancients as a model for life. Thus, lest master Gerard of Cremona be lost in the shadows of silence, lest he lose the credit that he deserved, lest in brazen theft another name be affixed to the books translated by him (especially since he set his name to none of them),all the works he translated--of dialectic as of geometry, or astronomy as of philosophy, of medicine as of the other sciences--have been diligently enumerated by his associates at the end of this Tegni just translated by him, in imitation of Galen's enumeration of his own writings at the end of the same book; so that if an admirer of their works should desire one of them, he might find it the quicker by this list, and be surer of it.
Although he scorned fame, although he fled from praise and the vain pomp of the world; although he refused to spread his name in a quest for empty, insubstantial things, the fruit of his works diffused through the world makes plain his worth. For while he enjoyed good fortune, possessions or their lack neither delighted nor depressed him; manfully sustaining whatever chance brought him, he always remained in the same state of constancy. Hostile to fleshly desires, he clove to spiritual ones alone. He worked for the advantage of all, present and future, mindful of Ptolemy's words: when approaching your end, do good increasingly. He was trained from childhood at centers of philosophical study and had come to a knowledge of all of this that was known to the Latins; but for love of the Almagest, which he could not find at all among the Latins, he went to Toledo; there, seeing the abundance of books in Arabic on every subject, and regretting the poverty of the Latins in these things, he learned the Arabic language, on order to be able to translate. In this way, combining both language and science (for as Hamet says in his letter De proportione et proportionalitate, a translator should have a knowledge of the subject he is dealing with as well as an excellent command of the languages from which and into which he is translating), he passed on the Arabic literature in the manner of the wise man who, wandering through a green field, links up a crown of flowers, made from not just any, but from the prettiest; to the end of his life, he continued to transmit to the Latin world (as if to his own beloved heir) whatever books he thought finest, in many subjects, as accurately and as plainly as he could. He went the way of all flesh in the seventy-third year of his life, in the year of our Lord Jesus Christ 1187.
These are the titles of the books translated by master Gerard of Cremona, at Toledo: [socii list of 71 items follows].
Source: Grant, Edward, ed. A Source Book in Medieval Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.