 Dr. Anthony Esslin, thank you so much for being with me today. It's always an honor and privilege and just enjoyable to talk with you. Well, thanks Connor. It's always great for me to catch up with anybody from the great Gallagher family. That's good, very good. Well, we are here to talk about something very, I think near and dear to both of our hearts, and that's your brand new translation of Saint Augustine's Confessions. And it's just a masterpiece. I have a copy of it here, which will be nicely displayed on the website. But it's actually a deluxe edition because it's already a classic, and so we figured it deserved that classic deluxe look. But let me just give a few introductory points and then I'll get into some questions to you as the translator. So, you know, we contacted you. I had the idea of doing a new translation of Augustine's Confessions after I had read a biography of Augustine and had read one translation and listened to another of Augustine's Confessions and dabbled in some of his other works. And I was realizing, Tony, that more than any saint Augustine spoke to me, and it's, he just captured my heart in a lot of ways. And it's not because he's brilliant. He is brilliant, but it was because he was so passionate. And he was somebody who was looking to see the presence of God in every nook and cranny of the world, every part of his life. And it was somebody who I saw him from the time he was young through his whole life. He grappled with the problem of evil and sin, you know, just befuddled in a way about how sin could even be, especially in his own life and those of others just looking around saying, how could I do this? What is my motive? What am I trying to do here? And so I just, I felt him so honest and so pure in his thinking and, and so lively in his passions and emotions. I just said, if I could be with any saint, it would probably be him. So, so then I know that you're such a fantastic translator, a translator who had done Dante's comedy and many others. And we've worked together in the past. So I said, okay, if I could choose any translator, anyone, of all the Latin scholars out there, all the theologians out there to translate Saint Augustine's confessions, who would it be? And the answer was not just a theologian, not just a Latinist, but it had to be somebody who understood the heart of Saint Augustine. You have to understand the words, but somebody who could understand the soul of what Augustine was, his soul and what he was going after in his mind and heart. And so I said, there's no one better than the great Dr. Anthony Esslin. So, so grateful you said yes. And you've completed this masterpiece. So thank you very much for that. So my very first question after that long intro is just very general. And then I'll get into some more specifics. What was it like to work on a masterpiece like Augustine's Confessions? Boy, well, it was, it was rather like working on Dante. I've done a lot of translating. And not just the works that we've mentioned, but a few others in both Latin and Italian, and Anglo-Saxon for that matter. But it was like Dante in this regard. You can't let any word slip. Latin is an extraordinarily terse language. And Augustine was, of course, a trained rhetorician. He was absolutely steeped in what we would call classical Latin literature, and then also steeped in scripture. So much so that if you're not watching out, you could miss at any moment the fact that he's alluding to scripture, or the fact that he's got something from Virgil in mind. And, you know, it's all packed with things. And more than ever, I was persuaded that my, my priorities as a translator were correct with regard to somebody like Augustine. That is, you have to be extremely careful to render the literal meaning of the text because in that literal meaning are embedded all kinds of figurative meanings. If you, if you just translate in a way so as to suggest the gist of what the phrase means, but not literally, you're going to miss the metaphor that's locked up in the literal meaning. At least he's doing this all the time. You think that he's using just some verb in an abstract sense, but no, he, he means it also in its literal sense. And that's very easy for us to let slip by. And I, at all costs, I didn't want to let such things slip by. Oh, it's beautiful. And I'm going to actually read a short sample of one of your, your translated passages in a few minutes. But before we get more into kind of what it's like to translate this, let's kind of step back out. And I'm going to share with you one of my favorite quotes from St. Bonaventure. I actually have it hanging in Latin over my computer screen in my office. And the English translation says, you cannot understand the words of St. Paul without having the spirit of St. Paul. So Bonaventure said that about St. Paul, right? So he's saying, if you really want to understand a great saint or scripture, you have to have kind of the spirit of that. So how, how was this a spiritual endeavor for you? I mean, I know an atheist could render an accurate translation in a way, but how, how was your spiritual connection with Augustine or your, your personal devotion to the faith to the Lord, you know, how did that factor into your work here? That's an interesting question. The first time that I read Augustine, I was at Princeton and Princeton could be a very dark place for people of faith. It's a little bit better now, believe it or not, than it was 45 years ago or whatever, 40 years ago. Anyway, I, I picked up Augustine then because his name had been mentioned so frequently in the Renaissance English courses that I was taking there and the medieval courses that I said, well, I've got to read. I've got to read it. Okay. And so I went to the university bookstore, picked up copy of the Confessions, began to read. And at that time, where I was intellectually, the biographical part of Augustine's Confessions, first, first nine books, they moved me, but they didn't, they didn't knock me over the way the final four books did at that time. Those final four books have to do with the ultimate things and the most fundamental things. What is matter? What is time? How is it that we are not just material beings? What did it mean when the scripture says, in the beginning, God made the heavens and the earth? What's the difference between an indefinite length of time, even an infinite length of time and eternity? I was stunned by, first of all, by the questions he was asking. I had assumed that only modern thinkers asked these questions. See how foolish I was. I was not only stunned by the fact that he was asking the questions. His answers were more satisfying, were richer, more, well, more able to be developed, more suggestive of more and more possibilities than anything that I had gotten from any, from any modern philosophy. That's holy cow. This is written 1600 years ago and I am just amazed. It's opened up a whole intellectual universe for me and if I was ever in any doubt as to what I was going to do in graduate school, I was no longer in doubt. I was going to study medieval and Renaissance literature and I was going to read as much of Augustine as I could. But now that I've been teaching it in colleges since 1992, Augustine's, the biographical part, the first nine books have meant more and more to me. Maybe when you get, when you get a few years under your belt and you take stock of your life as Augustine did and he was begged by his flock and his fellow bishops and priests to write the story of his life, right? The story of his conversion. I guess the more sin you get under your belt and the more years you get under your belt, the more you are going to be moved by that. And then I began to see that he wasn't just giving a biography, that the whole of Augustine's confessions always was, even in the biographical part, about what the universe is, what a human being is, why or how we are made in the image of God, what the providence of God is, how the providence of God is different from our making plans for ourselves, how the knowledge of God is different from our memory. He's always talked about that and I mean the sheer brilliance is astonishing. It's deeply moving because he's a sinner, but it's so powerful because we are all in that position to, he was a wayfarer in this life, so were we. He was not in control of the story of his life. Well, we're not either. We hardly even know what it means to be dwelling inside a story, but this is the story authored by God, not by ourselves. Oh, it's beautiful. And speaking about that, I'm going to read a little passage. Now, I want to read this because this struck me as I know, how do I say this? It was difficult for me to know when Augustine's masterpiece was ending and Tony's masterpiece was beginning. It was a little hard to do that, but I have read another translation. I've listened to another and I did not experience Augustine's true masterpiece until I've read your translation. So it's hand in glove, but I picked a small passage in book two from the very popular parts of this is, you know, when he's talking about puberty and lust and, you know, people love to talk about that part. So I chose a passage and I can see that a lot of translators could handle just a few of these phrases differently and boy, you hit a grand slam on this. So here's a little passage, just a paragraph. It's in book two. He says, mists came breathing up from the muddy cravings of the flesh and the springs of puberty. And they overcast and darkened my heart so that I could not tell the difference between the clear skies of genuine love and the fog of lust, both love and lust, roiled in confusion. And they swept me weak, my weakling youth over the falls of desire and plunged me into the gulping whirlpool of crimes. Your anger against me rose in strength, but I was not aware of it. I had been drummed death by the clashing chains of my morality, the penalty for my soul and its pride. I went far away from you and you let me go. And I was tossed here and there spilled out overflowing, frothing over in my fornications. And still, you kept silent. I mean, what a passage. What a passage. I mean, but it's, I know, I know absolutely for certain that it was a brilliant passage written by Augustine, but a brilliant translation because there's so much language there, Tony, that's connected. And you were having to choose just the perfect words to let that message continue to roll through the syllables and you did it. So please talk to us about choosing the perfect words because while I don't have the Latin in front of me, and even if I did, I wouldn't know, you know, what I was looking at you, you know that not all synonyms are equal. And you here and I know that you stress over, am I choosing the right word to keep this rhythm and the meaning going? And boy, I just know from as a recipient, you did it. So please talk about choosing the perfect word. Well, that passage there is quite a mighty passage. He has deliberately chosen a couple of closely related similes that have to do with fog, mist, things bubbling up from underneath, boiling with being rushed headlong by streams, right? It's a rhetorical masterpiece, but he doesn't just mean it rhetorically. He means for you to take these things quite literally, right? To be in that situation was like being somebody benighted, tossed about here and there by deadly torrents, right? As if you had been wrecked in the middle of a flood on a river, and you were not just floating calmly down, but being rushed down and among whirlpools too that develop inside the flooded river, right? The words are all there. They're all there in the Latin. What's required is just to be humble enough to let those words take over, not to be afraid. Again, as I said before, not to be afraid of their literal meanings because they all line up. And sure, you could translate a word like like fawkes as golf, but it literally means jaw, fouches, jaws, and that's what the Romans would use to describe the mouth of a volcano or the mouth of something like a whirlpool that would suck you under, okay? We don't say the jaws of a volcano, I suppose say crater, but crater from Greek meaning cup for the shape, but for the action and the threat of death and complete destruction, you want jaws, and it means in any way. So you use the literal word, it conveys a whole host of powerful associations. They're all right there in the text. Well, let me tell you, let's talk about something that's not in the text, and that's the footnotes. And so this translation is a little bit unique in this way too. I think it's unique and it's smooth, it's lyrical. Actually, in your introduction, Tony, you said that you really wanted to help the reader keep reading quickly, like move along, and translations can become clumpy, but yours is smooth and lyrical and it's like, it allows the text to sound like the hymn of praise and reconciliation that it is. I feel like I'm reading the Psalms, you know, when I'm reading this book. The Psalms hundreds and hundreds of times. Which brings us to footnotes, because, you know, there was so many, in my experience with Confessions before, I knew there were so many passages that I'm like, what does this mean? What's this a reference to? And I didn't know. So I remember telling our editor, hey, you know, keep poking Dr. Estlund to include a whole bunch of footnotes. You remember that, I guess, you know. I remember that. Yeah. And you did it, man. You did it. And they're perfect. They're perfect. And that's, I know it's, that's got to be kind of a grueling. It's not the fun part of translating for somebody like you, but it makes it the reading for somebody like me very accessible. And so at every time, whenever I'm reading something, first of all, you cite to Psalms and to Scripture, you show how often he's making a reference to something that I would never have caught, because he doesn't always put in quotes, you know, and, and then also And it's all from his memory. It's all he's echoing from memory. Yeah. So I mean, he might not even remember when he's citing, it's just coming out naturally, you know. So, but the references to the Aeneid, in particular, the Latin, you know, literature that he grew up on, the Neoplatonism and Platonic philosophy, it was so part of his life. You give us wonderful footnotes. And so this is going to have to become a staple text for, you know, people reading this in school and college, and we really hope to push that to universities and start using this as their addition. So for anybody who's intimidated by, you know, Augustine's Confessions, I think the footnotes help tremendously. So great job on that. Well, thank you. I had originally sort of hoped against hope that somebody else would do the footnotes, because it turned out to be a lot of work. But you know, what I did with with Augustine, the same kind of thing that I did with my translation of Dante, I, when I was translating Dante, I imagined my freshman, my college freshman reading it. Okay. And I asked, okay, well, what would these college freshmen best profit by in terms of page glosses and helpful material in the back, appendices and notes, and little introductions to each canto in the back. And whatever I figured they could use to help understand the text and make reading it easier for them. So that they could, they would not have to nothing would as little as possible would stand in their way of appreciate appreciating the phone. Yeah, I put in and I try to do some of the same with with the Confessions here. Once you guys said, you got to do the notes. I said, okay, what does an intelligent general reader or say a college freshman, what does that person need? The person doesn't necessarily need, doesn't need a whole bunch of references to contemporary scholars, but could really use to see what Augustine is doing with scripture since that's always, I mean, there are, there are, there are hundreds of references to the Psalms alone, let alone, all the rest of scripture. And but also, you know, so, so he was going to be, he is going to be dropping names and referring to works of human thought that he, that is more learned readers would be familiar with. And you guys persuaded me that, you know, your average reader coming upon is easy, need a little bit of help, but the books of the Platonists says, says, Augustine, well, what the heck are they? Right. And, you know, to be honest, most college graduates right now would not be able to tell you what the heck are they, right? Yeah, yeah. And so can I help help read her up? Right, right. The overriding concern. Tell me in a nutshell, and this might be a hard question, if I was in your position, I might not want to answer it, but tell me how your translation might be different from others out there. I'm not asking you to give direct comparisons to naming them, but you must have taken a glance or were familiar with other translations because you've been teaching this. So what was some distinguishing factor that you really tried to bring to this? Well, I had cut my teeth on Monsignor John Ryan's translation, which I admire. And I have nothing bad to say about that translation. The older translations used, frankly used sort of archaic, archaic English manners of speaking, you know, with the early modern pronouns, the thou and ye, and so forth, and early modern endings on verbs, right? He goeth, and so forth. That is still, I think, very much alive and very, very good for hymns, but it's not going to, it's not going to be fit for a very long prose text. So the older, older translations from the 1800s, they were not adequate, yet the newer translations, even Ryan's translation, quite often let the poetry of Augustine's work slide just a little. So they were a little too quick to go the abstract route or render the gist of something rather than what was really there in the kernel. And Ryan's was the best translation that I had read of all the modern translations. I have not liked any translation since Ryan's translation. And so Frank Sheed would be in that list? I have not read Frank Sheed's translation, but there have been a couple that have gotten some popularity among teachers of the Confessions in, let's say, the last 15 or 20 years. Yeah. I don't want to mention to my name. None of those translations are bad exactly, but they would often have me scratching my head and saying, wait a second, wait a second, something's missing here or wait a second. I ended up going back to Latin saying, you know, something's off. Yeah. One of the more recent translations is vitiated by the use of so-called gender neutral language. And that's going to destroy the eloquence in the poetry whenever he is talking about man in general. So I mean, that's so frustrating. You just want to throw the book against it. Yeah. All right. Well, let's two last questions for you, kind of as we wrap up. And the first is, I'll just ask both at the same time. The first is what do you say to people that might think, well, Augustine's too hard to read and I'm a simpleton. And then also, what do you say to people that might say, oh, I read it 25 years ago in college. So I know that book. I kind of refer to the second one myself a little bit. I'll give you my take, but there's certain books that need to be reread and reread and reread. And the Odyssey, the Aeneid come to mind, Shakespeare is not a one-time thing. Dante's not a one-time thing. And Augustine is not a one-time thing, especially a spiritual work like this. So, you know, first, what would you say to people think it's too hard? And that's not for me. I just need simple little devotional books that Tan sells and we don't need a harder book like this. And then the people who said, ah, I read that years ago. To the first, especially the biographical books, it's not that hard. Okay. The first nine books, he's talking about his life and his thoughts, his friendships, his sins, his confusions. It was meant for a fairly broad audience. And what may be difficult in it, as we've said, I've provided help in the back so as to get you familiar with the names of people that he's talking about and what they wrote or what they did and who was who and so forth. So, that's not going to fly. But as to the other question, I read it. Is it a question that hardly makes sense? Let's suppose that when you're 20 years old, when you're 20 years old, there's about the time when I read Augustine for the first time, you go to the, let's say you visit the Sistine Chapel. Okay. And there are all of these paintings, not only by Michelangelo up on the ceiling and in the sanctuary, but paintings by some great masters flanking the walls on one side paintings from the life of Phosas on the other side corresponding paintings from the life of Christ by people like Perugino. Anyway, so you say, well, I went to the Sistine Chapel when I was 20 years old. So, even though I'm in Rome right now, I'm not going there. I saw it already. That's insane. Okay. First of all, it's insane because it's some of the greatest art that man has ever produced. Why would you not want to look at it again? Right? But second, you're not the same person that you were back then, right? You know a lot more. You've lived a lot more. You've perhaps read things or seen things or heard things that now would make your going to the Sistine Chapel meaningful to you in a more profound way, certainly in a different way. Okay. First time I was in the Sistine Chapel, I knew nothing, absolutely nothing, of Renaissance polyphony. So I could not imagine what it would be like to hear the great Miserere be chanted and sung by a choir of this polyphonic music written by Gregorio Allegri in the late 1500s. What that was like, I didn't even know there was such a thing. And now I know not only that there was such a thing, but that Mozart heard it when he was a boy and committed the music to memory. It had never been written down. It was passed down from one chapel master to another. And that Mendelssohn heard it, Felix Mendelssohn, and then wrote afterwards, the young Mendelssohn wrote that he had heard the pure essence of music. And it was in that spot. You go there now as a person, I mean, it's, it's, you know, you read King Lear as a young man, you're bowled over, you read King Lear as an older guy. And some of Lear's some of Lear's insecurities as an old man who people may think he has passed his time. They take on new meaning for you. So with Augustine, you can read him as a new man every time you return to him. Yeah. Yeah. The same way that you approach all works of great music and art. They're not, it's not just like, Oh, I did that. Like, like you're checking off a list or something. That's, that's crazy. Well, I love it. Well, thank you. And I thought was a great, a great answer. And I just want to thank you personally for the tremendous service you've done to the church and doing this work. I mean, this, you know, every great saint needs a great mind in the modern day to help them out. The fact is that Augustine needs our help today. He needs Tans help and he needs Dr. Esselen's help. So you've done it. And I think this is going to become the, the gold standard translation for generations to come until, you know, our great, great, great grandchildren are sitting around talking about a new translation of Augustine and they'll compare that new one to the great Dr. Esselen's translation. But thank you for your work. And thank you for being here in our, you know, interview today. And God bless you and your continued service to the church. Thank you, Connor. God bless you and your family too. Thank you. Take care now.