Thomas Williams spends a decent chunk of the introduction to his new translation of St. Augustine's Confessions justifying its existence. What can yet another translation hope to provide? Did Augustine steal more pears since the last one?
Last year I read Sarah Ruden's 2017 translation, and re-read the limpid F. J. Sheed translation that first introduced me to Augustine. Of these three the Williams is the one I'd hand to an Augustine newcomer. In both its lyrical prose and its excellent, spiritually rich apparatus you can feel Williams's teaching experience (he is a professor at the University of South Florida). A disclaimer: I don't read Latin. I can only judge how useful a Confessionsis to the barbarian. But Williams translates with great love for the barbarians.
Williams the teacher drops a delightful footnote contrasting the use of the term “son of Adam” in the Confessions and in the Narnia books. He leans on the resources of his own Anglican church to make his translation “formal without being stilted or archaic,” to give it beauty and resonance—and a whiff of incense so we don't forget why we're here.
Perhaps the most teacherly aspect of his translation is his emphasis on the structure of Augustine's work. As he writes in the introduction, the autobiographical books of the Confessions make a whole with “a first half of progressive disintegration, a second half of progressive reintegration”—the first initiated by Augustine and the second by God. Williams cites even seemingly small details to make this structure visible, like the near-absence of personal names in the first half and the sudden “flood” of names in the second: “His use of proper names is meant to reinforce this connection between the disintegration and reintegration of his soul and the disintegration and reintegration of his human relationships.” Williams's discussion of the way the “three lusts” of 1 John 2:16 organize the autobiographical books, his discussion of passages that mirror one another, and his emphasis on the role of “fragmentation and reintegration” all the way through the final three books all serve to help the reader organize Augustine's writing and see a complete narrative, rather than a memoir followed by three weird discourses on eternity and what whales mean.
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