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Customer Review
- Reviewed in the United States on February 22, 2012First, the book: it is standard paperback perfectbound. Nothing special, but not exceptionally bad. I believe the hardcover is also perfectbound (they should call it "lousybound") instead of sewn; and why would I buy a hardcover, if the binding is not sewn? It won't lay open flat, which makes it even harder to read than a paperback! For $8.00, cheaper than some others, this translation is by far the best on the market.
Hays is faithful to the Greek (sometimes overliteral, rarely overfree), more so than other translations. Hays manages to transmit more of the style and mood of Aurelius' actual writing than any other translation by an order of magnitude: this can be a blessing or a curse.
However much I demand that my Bibles be literally/formally translated to carry over as much as possible even of the order and form of the God-breathed words (I can't read Hebrew or Aramaic), it's not something I desire in literature, for which, being uninspired (except artistically), the actual words and idioms used generally have no great value, the value instead being in the sense of the text. (I think Hofstadter's Godel Escher Bach is an exception to this, and can't imagine that it can be translated, as so much of the meaning of the book depends on form and peculiarities of the English language.)
St Jerome had much the same opinion, stating, I believe in an epistle to St Augustine while defending his (debatable) choice of translating his Vulgate from the Jews' modern Hebrew (which had already entered in on the process of eliminating prophecies of Christ, leaving us with gems such as, "like a lion my hands and feet", which, with different pointing, reads, "they have pierced my hands and feet" - the first one doesn't even make sense!) instead of their ancient Septuagint Greek: "When translating the sacred scriptures, I attempt to give Greek and Hebrew a clothing of Latin, retaining even the word order so far as it is possible [that is, formal translation: in the process giving rise to "Ecclesiastical Latin", as the Vulgate is no more Ciceronian or Virgilian Latin than Spanish is] but when translating the works of men, I endeavor to translate the sense of what is being said, not only the words [that is, dynamic translation]".
De Selincourt's translations of Livy are some of the best examples of the latter. Livy is far from inspired: I care little about the form of the words he used, but the sense. De Selicourt's translation has me laughing aloud, much as I imagine the original readers would have, at the constant ineptitude and malice of the tribunes, always pushing for "agrarian reform" as a rallying-cry. Ancient historians did not set out to write just a history, but also a work of great literature: mere modern history was accounted unworthy of the pen, and was for the annals of the priests, to be recorded in lists of names, locations, and dates. Names, locations, and dates do not alone a history make: the ancients understood this. That's why ancient history, from Livy to Plutarch*** to Suetonius to Xenophon to Tacitus to Polybius, is uniformly excellent, and why modern history is uniformly bad in comparison. The best of modern history, the transitional and seminal Decline and Fall of Gibbon, is the closest one comes, but it is colored and ruined by a deep hatred of all things clerical, Catholic, and Christian, which absolutely permeates the work, and a subtext of love for the barbaric Mohammedans, whom he viewed as "rational" in comparison. At least he got his bias towards the degenerate Byzantine empire and its ossified Orthodox religion right.
***Speaking of Plutarch, one has two choices: the modern and decent translations of Penguin in horrible editions, issued in half a dozen books with many lives overlapping (i.e. Alexander is in two books, Caesar in three) in a series that is still incomplete, with the lives presented out of order and Plutarch's comparisons either omitted entirely or presented after one of the lives mentioned, whereas the life being compared to is not even in the same volume, let alone back to back: or Modern Library's old translation from the 1600s (updated in the 1800s to remove the most archaic verbiage and most of the archaic pronouns) that reads poorly (even worse than Dickens, and I hate Dickens), as a stereotyped "classic", but is presented in two volumes in correct order with the comparisons, much as Plutarch intended. One needs both editions, so one can read the Penguin translations in the order given in Modern Library, and then read Modern Library's printing of Plutarch's comparisons of lives. (If one had to choose one or the other, the trade-off for readability in the Penguin is too great, compared to the poor presentation: one should choose the Modern Library.)
That brings me to the best of the "truly modern" historians, Steven Runciman; his work is terrible compared to the ancients, and stellar compared to the rest of the moderns, who are more suited to writing technical specifications or books of law than anything else. Lest anyone think the moderns are more truthful or less biased, Runciman's obsessive fawning over that same decrepit Orthodox religion and overweening sympathy for the degenerate Byzantines (and even a hint of sympathy for those enemies of all civilization, the paynim foe, the Mohammedan, who had encroached on the lands of Christendom for four centuries and were slaughtering and enslaving pilgrims to the Holy Land to attempt to prop up their failing empire by trying to acquire new sources of dhimmis wherever they could be found) should dispel that notion - only sourcing has been improved. But even with bibliographies, one can choose and weight a work towards those extremely biased sources, such as Anna Komnena's report of the Crusade (which Runciman relies heavily upon). Warren Carroll is likely the best historian of our generation, with Jaroslav Pelikan close behind; but Jaroslav Pelikan, unlike Carroll and Toynbee, did not do "surveys of history", but focused on a very specific topic. Much as all of the professions, except for the noble philosophers and theologians (and even those, to a degree) have become so cripplingly overspecialized as to be facetious to non-specialists.
Some philosophy (notably Aristotle) requires the translation to be stiff if one is to follow Aristotle's thought, and not the translator's interpretation of his philosophy (much like the Bible), which can never be trusted today. It reminds me of the old Bollingen Plato which I had to use when studying philosophy, before the much better Hackett editions and the new single-volume one were released, where all of the introductions gushed, "Plato was so smart - almost as smart as we (Hume, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger) are!" (blasphemy - Aristotle had more philosophical sense when he grunted to take a shite than Hume did in thirty years of writing ponderous tomes of trash).
For other translations, "The Emperor's Handbook" is lousy, IMO. It's too loose. I cut my teeth on Staniforth's translation, which is archaic, overly flowery, and too loose at the same time. I think the Hammond translation is the second best (after Hays) out there.
I also prefer Hays immensely because he leaves "logos" untranslated (instead of translating it as a range of words, improperly injecting interpretation in to the text, as no one option, such as "reason", works in all places in the Meditations), and, reading the book as a Catholic, I am often amazed at the insights towards Christ (the Logos) that are revealed in the jarring disconnect between the English translation and the transliteration of "logos" - I often think that Emperor Marcus Aurelius was writing about Christ; whether by accident of language, coincidence of Hellenistic philosophy, divine inspiration, or because the Christian ethos had already so permeated the Empire by the time of the writing of the Meditations, I know not. Nevertheless, Hays' translation can be used in places nearly as a Christian devotional instead of reading like Enlightenment garbage crossed with paleo-paganism and new ageism, as the Staniforth translation reads (always capitalizing "Reason", "the Whole [as in, 'return to "the Whole" at death']"). When reading Greek philosophy, "logos" is such a common word it loses its power and distinction as essentially the Incarnate Word, appearing constantly in contexts where Christ never would because of the nature of truth, being seen as in a mirror darkly - not so in the Meditations, this translation has shown, wherever "logos" is, one can insert "the Logos" and get an even greater sense of Aurelius' text - I am tempted to say a sensius plenor.
