Confessions: A New Translation

by Augustine, Peter Constantine (Translator), Jack Miles (Foreword by)

Overview

This long-awaited translation of Confessions, which Stephen Greenblatt describes as central to the legacy of Adam and Eve, enlivens the beguiling world of late antiquity.

No modern, well-versed literature lover can call her education complete without having read Augustine’s Confessions. One of the most original works of world literature, it is the first autobiography ever written, influencing writers from Montaigne to Rousseau, Virginia Woolf to Gertrude Stein—and most recently informing Stephen Greenblatt’s provocative thesis about one of our foundational mythologies in The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. It is here that we learn how one of the greatest saints in Christendom overcame a wild and reckless past, complete with a rambunctious posse of friends, an overly doting mother, and an affair that produced a “bastard” child. Yet English translators have long emphasized the ecclesiastical virtues of Augustine’s masterpiece, often at the expense of its passion and literary vigor. Restoring the lyricism of Augustine’s original language, Peter Constantine offers a masterful and elegant rendering of Confessions in what will be a classic for decades to come.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780871407597
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	01/23/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Peter Constantine's most recent translations are Sophocles’ Theban Trilogy, The Essential Writings of Machiavelli, and The Bird is a Raven by Benjamin Lebert, which was awarded the Helen und Kurt Wolff Translation Prize. He was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann, and the National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov: Thirty-Eight New Stories. His translation of the complete works of Isaac Babel received the Koret Jewish Literature Award and a National Jewish Book Award citation. He has recently translated Gogol’s Taras Bulba, Tolstoy’s The Cossacks, and Voltaire’s Candide for Modern Library. He was one of the editors for A Century of Greek Poetry: 1900-2000, and is a senior editor at Conjunctions.
Jack Miles (Ph.D. Harvard) is Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies with the University of California at Irvine and Senior Fellow for Religious Affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy. He spent 1960–70 as a Jesuit seminarian, studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before enrolling at Harvard University, where he completed a Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages in 1971. His book GOD: A Biography won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996, and Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God led to his being named a MacArthur Fellow for 2003-07.

Editorial Reviews

11/15/2017
Constantine is well-known as a translator of books from such figures as Niccolo Machiavelli, Isaac Babel, and Anton Chekhov. Now he has completed a translation of Augustine's seminal work, which is also likely to be well received. When comparing this translation with other ones, readers will notice the attention given to such elements as vocabulary, grammar, syntax, clarity, and accuracy. In doing so, one finds that Constantine is particularly effective in expressing Augustine's simple and eloquent writing style, without losing his underlying complexity of phrases and thought. The opening sentence of Book 4 indicates this: "During that time of nine years, from when I was nineteen to twenty-eight, in the grip of many passions, I misled and was misled, I deceived and was deceived." Constantine is also effective in providing clarity to Augustine's theological ideas and reflections. While translations from scholars Henry Chadwyck and Maria Boulding are also of high quality, this version is unique and provides a significant contribution. VERDICT A new translation that will be of interest to theologians, scholars in classical literature, and admirers of Augustine.—John Jaeger, Johnson Univ.

Library Journal

11/13/2017
Translator Constantine (The Essential Writings of Rousseau) delivers a lyrical translation of what he calls “the world’s first autobiography,” transporting Augustine’s striking thoughts into streamlined modern prose. With personable candor, Augustine describes his lifelong battle against sexual temptation, remembering his youthful prayer: “Grant me chastity and continence, only not yet.” While the narrative voice feels contemporary, the content may jolt readers into recognizing that this work originates in a very different time. For example, extolling the virtues of his revered mother, Monica, whom he credits with his conversion, Augustine admires her skill in calming her violent, unfaithful husband, and her practice of scolding her friends for the “shameful marks of beatings on their faces,” which she suggests they deserve for forgetting they are slaves. Emphasizing the necessity of relying fully on God instead of self when faced with temptation, Augustine recounts how a virtuous friend, who avoided gladiator fights because of their cruelty, nevertheless succumbs to the spectacle’s seductive brutality when dragged by friends to the arena: “He drank in its savagery... intoxicated with blood-drenched delight.” Augustine’s direct appeals and poetic descriptions (“I was late in loving You, O Beauty so ancient and so new”) convey the passionate intimacy of his relationship with God. Constantine’s evocative rendering of this classic text will make it likely to appeal to a new generation of readers. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly