Confessions: A New Translation

by Augustine Augustine (Author), Peter Constantine (Author), Jack Miles (Author)

New
Paperback
2019
$16.24

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.

Synopsis

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.

$16.24

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 368
Edition: Translation
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 09 Apr 2019
ISBN 10: 163149600X
ISBN 13: 9781631496004

Author Bio

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.