Sunday, December 29, 2013
Holiday Reading?
I'm about a third of the way through Augustine's Confessions. I decided to pick it up because I'd recently run across references to it in a few different places that led me to think that I should read it, but I have to admit that so far I'm finding it terribly tedious. I worry that part of the problem might be a bad translation (Washington Square Press paper back from the 1950s that I picked up long ago for cheap). But I also have a stack of other books to start reading. Should I stick with the Augustine a bit longer?
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i think it's probably a good book to have a view of as a whole. but for all that i've never read the whole thing. i don't know if i'd say tedious, exactly, but it's pretty much like many books from the period: not really designed to motivate a modern reader to make it through them. i've found it to repay attention more often when something scholarly has brought me to it, and i've had time to read individual passages closely.
ReplyDeletei thought there was an interesting edition of it, released piecemeal in small volumes rather than all at once, i thought in translation by garry wills, but at the moment i can't locate that on the web - only his whole translation. i've been reading the OUP edition, which is fine. as i recall, wills makes a lot out of the book's rhetorical apparatus - augustine addressing himself to god (within the hearing of the reader), puzzling out how he could adequately do so, etc.
i have been having a similar problem the past year or two with rousseau's confessions. i think i really ought to read them, and i find the whole idea of them very interesting, but i haven't been able to make my way into the prose and into the details of rousseau's concerns, at least not enough so that i could stick with the book amid the other four million things i'm trying to have read.
among other things, i've been reading cora diamond and walt whitman's 'democratic vistas'.
Thanks for you comments. A few other friends encouraged me to stick with it, but we'll see. I've got some other more urgent reading to do, and another book that I didn't finish about a year ago (Talbot Brewer's The Retrieval of Ethics) that I've been trying to get back to, too.
ReplyDeleteI think I've only ever read an abridged version, so I can't comment on Augustine. I liked Tal's book a lot, and I think it still influences my thinking, but it seemed longer than necessary to me. I got more out of it when I started selectively skimming.
ReplyDeleteHuh. A favorite of mine. The Wills translation is the one to read for pleasure; Wills understands Augustine the rhetorician and Wills englishes the (sometimes remarkably elaborate) latin figures of Augustine. He published his translation with commentary in a series of small books from Viking. (j. mentioned these.) Those are worth having, especially the first (Saint Augustine's Memory), especially if you spend time with PI. But I would read the complete Wills translation first, and then go look at the commentary on sections that interest you.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Kelly. I have a feeling that I haven't really gotten to the "good stuff" and I'll have to put my paperback next to another translation and see if that helps. Or it could be that I'm just too much of a heathen...
ReplyDeleteAugustine understood being a heathen. --I hope you do find some good stuff.
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