They All Cried Out, "He Made Us" (Confessions, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our discussion on Augustine's Confessions, translator Peter Constantine discusses his own history with the text and how he came to translate it, the stylistic accomplishment of the Confessions, his translation process, and more.

Peter Constantine is the director of the Program in Literary Translation at the University of Connecticut, the publisher of World Poetry Books, and editor-in-chief of the magazine New Poetry in Translation. A prolific translator from several modern and classical languages, Constantine was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann, the National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his translation of The Bird Is a Raven by Benjamin Lebert, and the Koret Jewish Book Award and a National Jewish Book Award citation for The Complete Works of Isaac Babel.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Confessions, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/ConfessionsNL.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

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Episode transcript at https://seagull.wwnorton.com/Confessions/part2/transcript.

Transcript

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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading Scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W.W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino with Michael Von Canon producing. Today, we present the second of our two episodes devoted to Augustine's Confessions, as we interview its translator Peter Constantine. In part one, we explored who Augustine was and what he wrote, along with the historical context of his life. We also discussed the power of the Confessions and its Legacy. In this second episode, we learn about Peter's own engagement with Augustine and the Confessions, including the challenge of translating this work, Peter's favorite line from the Confessions, and much more. Peter Constantine is the director of the program in literary translation at the University of Connecticut, the publisher of World Poetry Books, and editor-in-chief of the magazine New Poetry in Translation. Constantine is a prolific and award-winning translator, whose efforts include works by Thomas Mann, Chekhov, and Isaac Babel. Peter Constantine, welcome back to the Norton Library Podcast! 

[Peter:] Hello, well found! 

[Mark:] It's good to see you again. I wanted to ask you as we start the second episode about the act of translating Augustine's Confessions. In the first episode you talked about codices and scribes and that this material is a millennium and a half old, so what material, what source are you using as you're rendering your translation into English? 

[Peter:] The Latin text that's come down to us is quite—I want to say clean, and what I mean is that the codices that we have do work well together. There is a great Augustinian scholar James J. O'Donnell, who has created a what we would call the definitive text in Latin, so when we read him in Latin that's what we read, also the annotations that O’Donnell did. They are extremely helpful for anyone who will read Augustine in Latin or anyone who might want to translate Augustine. So, one thing that one can rely on is that the textual work has been absolutely magnificent, and even in slight variations from the different codices that have come down to us have been noted, worked through, and thought through, and explained.

[Mark:] Peter, when did you first encounter Augustine's Confessions? 

[Peter:] I grew up in Greece, and I read Augustine about 17, I think, for the first time. It was in a Greek translation, by Andreas Dalezios. I was preparing for exams at Athens University. I was working on my Greek, as it were, because even though I grew up in Greece we weren't really a Greek family. My mother's Austrian and my father British, and it was really just my grandmother was Greek, so I do have Greek blood and Greek connections but not really in a direct way. Anyway, I found that book fascinating. It was basically written in purist Greek, Katharevousa, which was the old formal way of writing Greek that had just been abolished at the time, in other words, in the late very late 1970s, early 80s, so it was already a little bit of an anachronism. But what I found interesting about Dalezios’s translation of Augustine was as well the sort of zooming in and out of different Greek language registers, so he did have New Testament Greek for any of the quotations that are in the Confessions. As you read Confessions in English, you will notice little footnotes that there is a lot, a lot, a lot of biblical quotations that's threaded naturally into the language, so suddenly you'd go from purist Greek to New Testament Greek, but then, strangely enough, he would also have sort of demotic Greek, like the Greek spoken in the streets of Athens mixed in, which I thought was so strange. It was like a roller coaster reading that. That was my very first reading, and I think I was more fascinated with the language of the translation than anything else. And then later I also read Frangiski Ambatzopoulou, who did a later translation the late ' 90s of Augustine into Greek. The first one had been done in the ' 50s by the Dalezios, so it was done right after World War II. Those were the very first readings. Also, I read Augustine later on in German, Bekenntnisse—German is my mother tongue—but never in English. So always in all these other languages.

[Mark:] How did you come to translating it into English?

[Peter:] I've been living in the United States since 1983 and been translating for about 40 years now really. I’ve done several books for Norton. Two of the big projects: one were The Complete works of Isaac Babel from Russian, but there was also the Greek anthology from Homer until the present poetry [The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present] that Robert Weil, the editor and vice president of Norton, had commissioned, so I'd worked in many different ways, and I can't quite remember how Augustine came about, but it was almost, in my memory, a meeting between Robert Weil and myself, where we sort of both came up with the idea at the same time that it would be a great project to do, and I wanted to do Augustine as a natural literary text, not from a theological perspective because for me I could see in the Latin that the rhythms and the beauty of the language were really, for me, a protagonist, and I felt that in all the translations up to that point that they'd been done by theologians or Augustinian Specialists and also people who didn't necessarily have a translation background. Being a priest or a bishop or having spent your life specializing in Augustine does not really give you the tools to attempt a translation because Augustine is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant stylist, and to try and mimic that takes a lot of work and a lot of background.

[Mark:] Peter, if you try to put yourself in the position of somebody new to Confessions, maybe one of our Norton Library Podcast listeners just curious about this text, what do you imagine would be the challenges or difficulties that that reader would encounter? 

[Peter:] I think the reader would find it less of a challenge than one would expect because you think major Church Father, major Christian doctrinal writing—is it interesting? Do I want to read that? But, as I just mentioned, for me the protagonist is the language; it is the timing, the pacing; it matches the greatest works in world literature. He was a major, major, major stylist, and I think readers will find themselves drawn into the text, I think, by the beauty of the language. If the reader wants to connect to the Christian aspects, I think that is something that will be very fulfilling. I think if the reader is absolutely not interested in the Christian aspects at all but wants to—let's say, encounter Augustine the man, I think that's going to be very fulfilling. If one just wants to read a classical piece of beautiful literature, that also has historical moments that are very interesting and will draw us into the past. I think that's also very fulfilling. So, there are many reasons to read it, and the main worry about this being almost like reading a Christian text that you need to sort of work your way through, I think, falls away; that's not part of the equation. 

[Mark:] We touched on this a little bit in the first episode where you might hear with respect to genre, like, “oh, one of the chapters is a disquisition on memory and then there's the exegeses. Can I really penetrate that?” But you're saying that Augustine presents it in a way that is accessible? 

[Peter:] Yes, I would say that. And I would say that in two ways. I would say, first of all, do read the first nine books; enjoy those, and find yourself drawn into the next books. Look at the language; look at how it's done. If you falter in the very last chapters, I think thou shalt be forgiven. But it is a book that's really and truly worth engaging with. 

[Mark:] Here comes an unfair question, Peter. Do you have a favorite line in this book? 

[Peter:] Yeah, actually, I wouldn't say it's un—well, maybe it is unfair because it's hard to find a line. There is a favorite passage, though, I would like to read, actually. I think it might show the style and the brilliance of the writing, I hope, you know, the rhythm. This is in book six, I believe, where he is seeking God and trying to find the truth, and this is what he writes. “But what is it that I love? I asked the Earth, and the Earth replied, “It is not me, and all that lives upon the Earth declared the same.” I asked the sea, and its depths and all the reptiles living there, and they replied, “We are not your God. Seek Him above us.” I asked the blowing winds, and the air and all that lives within replied, “Anaximenes was wrong. I am not God.” I asked the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, and they replied, “Nor are we the God you're seeking.” And I said to all the things outside the gates of my flesh, “Tell me of that God you are not, tell me something about him,” and in a mighty voice, they all cried out, “He made us.”

[Mark:] Wow, where would that have taken place within Augustine's life? 

[Peter:] This would be before the baptism, as he's still seeking. He's looking for the answer because he used philosophy and thought—well, philosophy—to seek the truth, and this is why he is a major philosopher and theologian. It's not just a question of blind belief; it's a question of thinking things through and coming to the conclusion that this is the truth, and this passage here was an indication of part of that journey. 

[Mark:] When you read a passage like that, do you react to it as a translator? Is there something about the presentation of that language in its original that you observe? 

[Peter:] For me this is perhaps an unfashionable thing to say, as I'm a professor of translation studies, I would maybe not be too happy about hearing a translator say that. But, okay, so for a passage like this I try to mimic the rhythms and the timing because one notices as one reads the sudden change. It's almost like a purple passage, so it is a mimicry, which is maybe an unfashionable concept in translation studies. The fact that if Augustine had written it in English, this is, I hope, how he would have written it, so that, in a sense, is a thought of yesteryear of the generation of the '80s and '90s that I came out of. But I strongly feel that it's very true for a passage like this. 

[Mark:] Is Augustine's rhythm consistent throughout Confessions? Or does it depend on what he's talking about and where in the book we are? 

[Peter:] He's consistently in absolute control of it, but what I just read now is not necessarily the speed or the rhythm throughout. you will notice that the sentences are very, very controlled because he was a great rhetorician speaker. He could speak for hours and hours. In fact, there is a moment when he gives up rhetoric where he says that his lungs were suffering. And if we think about that what that really means, is that he spent all day giving these speeches that were often written down, then he would also compose by speaking with scribes, stenographers, editors, and so on creating. So, he might well have a situation where he's from dawn to dusk of talking and talking and talking in this very, very controlled and—with controlled I mean it as in brilliant control; I don't mean controlled as in dry—inspired.

[Mark:] In command of what he's talking about.

[Peter:] Yes, absolutely yes.

[Mark:] Do you have a Confessions hot take, something counterintuitive or controversial, maybe something that you notice in this text that is against the prevailing accepted commentary?

[Peter:] In the previous episode, I mentioned the issue of slavery and, I think, that's something that would be interesting for the reader of Confessions. Maybe that’s something to think about if the reader is looking for a controversial moment. But to think about the Christian church at the time, they were not abolitionists; they were more like, “if you are a slave, be a good slave.” That is what the Lord would expect: be humble, be good. So, that’s maybe problematic if we look at it from today's perspective, but it was part of the reality of the time. We see also later on—if one wants to read some of the letters, particularly letters that were found relatively recently that write about Augustine as a judge, where he condemns slavery but in a sort of a strange way because there was a major slave trade going on, and marauders would pick up people and sell them. But the issue was: you're born into slavery, that's one thing; but if you're a free Roman citizen, and you're captured and sold into slavery, that's illegal. That was what he was working with—with Alypius as well, who we see as his friend and fellow Bishop in the Confessions. That's something I've been thinking about recently, but I don't know if that's a fair thought or really a fair thing to think about, if I'm not suddenly becoming—in a sense, well, I think, one needs to question, but it's just so difficult. One needs to try and also teleport oneself back and sort of see the reality    and try and understand it from as many—to keep as openminded as possible to the issues that were faced at the time because, for instance, Augustine was also under threat at the time. There was a slave ship where, while he was away, some of his monks and priests had freed these people and were hiding them in his monastery, and he had to sort of deal with that, and the question really was the legality. And the fact that these were—in the question is are they citizens or are they slaves? But he, the monks, the monasteries, and everything were in danger of being prosecuted as well for that, so what I mean is, it's a very complicated and fascinating thing to think about.

[Mark:] Has Confessions throughout the years been repurposed or presented in a different way other than this text for some of our listeners to explore? 

[Peter:] I'm not too aware of that. I know there was a miniseries of an Italian production, actually. I think it’s a two-part series about Augustine's life based in the Confessions with Franco Nero as the old Augustine, but that's the only one thing that I know about from there. So, we don't see anime, manga, or that which one does for a lot of other things, which maybe would be interesting as well to sort of bring it into of graphic novels.

[Mark:] Do you have a Confessions playlist, or is there music that inspires when you consider this text? 

[Peter:] Oh, I've never thought of that at all, actually. For me it was always the silent reading of it, which Augustine also was sort of surprised, as we know, when he came across this first silent reader, the bishop, because that was not the way it was done. Everything was always read out loud; there was always sound. But I've never thought of connecting it to music or how I would connect it. 

[Mark:] Interesting. So, you associate it with silence.

[Peter:] Yes, or silent reading.

[Mark:] I want to go back for just a minute to your role as a translator. Just because it seems like it's such a challenge with a book like this. Is there a moment that you can talk us through the process of either a moment or a phrase even a word I know? I know you talked in the first episode about one such instance, but can you illustrate your process with Augustine? 

[Peter:] I worked with Augustine the way I've worked with Anton Chekhov, Isaac Babel, Gogol, and other Russian and—many Russian things that I did: by translating, first of all, word by word, which Augustine's contemporary Bishop Jerome also warns us against—it should be done sense by sense and not word by word, and this was the idea of how to translate the Bible, which was such a very important thing that has been a major topic in translation studies in over the last two Millennia. But what I do is word by word, and then look at it again, and then put the words into something that makes sense in English, and then look at the Latin for the rhythm, and then bring that rhythm there, then I would leave it for a day, and then I would read it again, and when I say line I mean I would work line by line, so the very first drafts would sound like somebody maybe a foreign speaker who has very little knowledge of English. It's a bit catastrophic, but it's very close and, of course, not every translator works that way. There are some who really sort of work on almost a ready draft, really. But for me, let's say I would do a page, and then go back again, and clean it up, and then no longer look at the Latin, and then clean it up again, and then move on to page two, so one thing about me was that when I was on page 50 I wasn’t on 50 because of this constant reediting of the first couple of pages and then moving on. So that might sound slightly obsessive, but I will say, in my own defense, that once that was done after two or three readings, I was fine with it. I'm not of those translators who keep going back and going back and also not somebody who necessarily might look at a translation and wish that—you know, I don't wish necessarily that I'd done something differently. In this case, when I brought up the word for servant or slave, I think there maybe but there, too, this could be sort of a topic of conversation as to what to do, and maybe I did the right thing so that it would not be jarring, let's say, to a modern ear—but maybe it needs to be jarring to a modern ear. And this is something that I'm wondering about now, without that word. But with other projects that I did for Norton such as the Isaac Babel, I don't have regrets of that kind; I feel that that's what I did, and that's what I've felt at the time, even that at this point is almost 20 years ago—actually, it is 20 plus years ago. But that's what’s done is done. 

[Mark:] When you're editing you always go from beginning to end?

[Peter:] Ultimately, yes. But initially, no. Initially, I try to—as a translator—do 800 to 1,000 words a day, which is maybe not that much, but if you do it every day it does add up, I will say. So those 800 would then mean that the next day I'd go back, and then back, and then back, and then move on, and then back, and back, and move on. But once it's all done, it does need to be read through. And something else that I do maybe is quite unusual now is I have my computers read it to me because it was once said by Sol Stein, the editor, that, you known, get a friend to read your text, but a friend who can't read well because if you have Meryl Streep reading something absolutely catastrophic to me, it will sound good because she's very good at reading. So, I don't want Meryl Streep reading. I want the computer; I want Alex the computer voice to read it to me, and then you can hear all kinds of little problems.

[Mark:] Interesting. I guess the final question I have about your edition is the generous endnotes in your paperback with pages after pages of usually biblical allusions that are all throughout Confessions. Do you have any suggestions for how a reader should utilize those allusions? Would you look up every single one? would you only look up the ones you're particularly curious about? Are they obtrusive? 

[Peter:] We had a very interesting conversation at Norton about what to do with the notes because I’d initially presented them as footnotes, and I'd also initially insisted that they should stay there so that the reader can really see how the language zooms in and out of biblical language, how well integrated and how well absorbed into the text, that is, with the footnotes at the bottom. But the editors point out very interestingly that that would ruin the reading because you read and you look down, and you’d be like, “Oh, wow! This is from Genesis. How interesting!” And then, “Oh, from Psalms!” “Oh, let me look that up,” and this and that. So that ruins— so the idea was to do endnotes, which initially I struggled against but now I see that means that you can read it, and what they pointed to was that the reader who really wants to know more can then find as much as is necessary and more in the back without it affecting the text without affecting the reading experience. 

[Mark:] It's just amazing—and I guess it should be unsurprising—the vocabulary and how immersed this text is and how frequent the allusions come, so you're right that the reader can look it up or not look it up according to uh their own inclination. With that in mind, maybe the last question, Peter, is I'm wondering if you have thoughts on the contemporary relevance of Confessions. What are the implications of this text in 2024? 

[Peter:] When I’ve reread Confessions and I've read it—actually, since my translation, I've read my Confessions twice, and I read a German Bekenntnisse and bits of an Italian one, actually not the whole thing, just several books. I think I might have mentioned that in the last episode, but every time I read it as something new; it seems very relevant because it's almost like reading a different book because I think of its wealth, sophistication, and it's many, many levels. As you're reading like what level you're connecting to, it can bring all kinds of things like from spiritual answers—if that's what you're looking for—to just reading an amazing piece of literature. It would maybe shock the reader but there are fictional elements, clearly, that are in it in order to make a point. And that also feeds into the autobiography, so it can also be read as an novel. And, in that sense, any of the great novels of world literature that might be read today with delight, the reason to read those would be the very same reason to you might want to read Confessions as just a piece of brilliant writing.

[Mark:] Peter Constantine, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library Podcast to discuss your edition of Augustine's Confessions. This has been fascinating. Thanks, Peter! 

[Peter:] I thank you very much.

[Mark:] The Norton Library Edition of Augustine's Confessions translated by Peter Constantine is available now in paperback and e-book. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.

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