Translators Bibliographies
As a longtime student and collector of the literature of Catholic conversion, it is natural that I shouldhave been attracted to St. Augustine's Confessions. It is, apart from the New Testament, of course, the Urtext of that particular genre. I've known the book for as long as I can remember, but my bibliographic interest in the work was limited until the fall of 1990, when I participated in a reading seminar on the Confessions with the classicist Danuta Shanzer at Cornell University. She introduced her students to the standard modern edition of the Confessions by Martin Skutella (Leipzig, 1934;reprinted Stuttgart, 1969 and 1981), and to the vast scholarly literature that has commented on the Confessions. Coincident with that seminar was the publication of a new English translation of the Confessions by the noted English patristics scholar Henry Chadwick (Oxford, 1991) (see no. 9 below). The fact that a fresh translation of such an established work, venerable even in its many English translations, was possible interested me greatly, and from that point on I kept my eyes open to watch for other translations.
In more recent years, as my collection of editions of the Confessions grew, I became increasingly intrigued by the translation tradition but at the same time frustrated by the seeming disinterest of the scholarly community—no one else seemed as interested as I was. Perhaps it is simply the richness of St. Augustine. Scholars have so much to work with in the text itself that there seems little time left over to discuss the translation and transmission of that text. Several recent works of commentary seem to bear this out. Nowhere, for example, in John M. Quinn's A Companion to the Confessions of St. Augustine (New York, 2002), Kim Paffenroth and Robert Peter Kennedy's A Reader's Companion to Augustine's Confessions (Louisville, Ky., 2003), or the relevant sections of Allan D. Fitzgerald's Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1999) is there any substantive discussion of the translation tradition. Recourse to Richard James Severson's The Confessions of Saint Augustine: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1888-1995. (Westport, Conn., 1996) shows that this is not a recent trend.
Which is not to say that this tradition has always and everywhere been ignored. Carl T. G. Schonemann's “Notitia Literraria in Vita, Scriptis et Editionibus Operum S. Augustini,” from the second volume of his Bibliotheca historico-literraria Patrum Latinorum (Leipzig, 1792-94), was a pioneering discussion of the editions and translations of all of Augustine's works. Benjamin Warfield brought Schonemann up to date with regard to the Confessions in a 1903 article for the American Journal of Theology. Much more recently has come the magisterial work of Willigis Eckermann, O.S.A., and the Augustinus-Institut of Wurzburg, particularly their Repertorium Annotatum Operum et Translationum S. Augustini: Lateinische Editionem und Deutsche Ubersetzungen (1750-1920) (Wurzburg, 1992), which is the first part of a proposed trilogy in which they have set out to explore the “Augustinusrezption” in 19th century Germany. Unfortunately, I fear, Eckermann's work has received far too little notice.
Why is any of this important? Because the work of bibliographers and book historians durning the last several decades has helped clarify the notion that our understanding of texts cannot be divorced from the questions of editions and translations, or even from the physical elements of the books themselves. If we want to understand Augustine, and particularly if we want to understand his effect on Christian thought and culture for the last millennium and a half, we have to investigate not just the texts in isolation, but how and what people actually read. And to do that, we've got to have access to the various editions and translations—but first someone has to collect them.
Thus, it is my fond hope that this exhibition and the gift of the William M. Klimon Collection of St. Augustine's Confessions to the newly inaugurated Center for Norbertine Studies at St. Norbert College will serve as a spur to, and a resource for, new scholarly work on how we know what we know about the work and the legacy of the sainted bishop of Hippo. And I find it particularly appropriate that these resources come to the Center for Norbertine Studies because St. Augustine has always been a great patron of the Praemonstratensian Order and we trust that his spirit of Christian inquiry, of faith seeking understanding, will always be integral to the work of St. Norbert College.
What follows is an annotated catalog of the editions of St. Augustine's Confessions on display in the Jeanne M. Godschalx Gallery at St. Norbert College, in De Pere, Wis., from October 9-20, 2006. The catalog is divided into three sections—English translations, other language editions, and fine press and other editions—and the selections are arranged chronologically within each section under the name of the translator or other important person associated with that edition. Neither time nor resources permitted me to take an analytical bibliographical approach in the following descriptions, but it is hoped that sufficient information has been gathered and presented here to make this a resource for such future work.