Interest in and enthusiasm for Augustine’s Confessions, both in academic circles and among the general public continues to maintain its fairly steady pace, and K.A. Bergdorf’s The Confessions of Saint Augustine: A Latin Reader’s Edition, is the latest addition to the field.
The book is intended solely as a reading text, and Bergdorf offers two aids in addition to the text: vocabulary and literary references. As far as vocabulary goes, readers of the UBS Greek New Testament Reader’s edition will recognize the format: the text (O’Donnell’s) is laid out by section (each given a heading by the author as an aid to comprehension), and a running vocabulary is provided. Words that occur 20 times or less in the Confessions are glossed immediately below each section. Words that occur more than 20 times are presented in a short glossary at the back of the book. The twenty-one words that occur more than 500 times are given their own section, though it is unlikely that anyone who uses this book will need that section (more on this later). Apart from the odd note that this or that verb is construed with a dative or an ablative, there is no grammatical commentary.
The running vocabulary is a splendid aid to reading the text, but perhaps even more useful to comprehension is the inclusion of references, within the text itself, to any another work of literature which Augustine quotes in the Confessions. These quotes are frequent, and, since most of us do not have, say, the Psalms, ready to hand in our memories, these simple notes are of great value to a reader who wants to move quickly through the text and at the same time get a clear picture of Augustine’s use, particularly of the Psalms, as a subtext.
In any edition there will be editorial choices that, depending on the user, either cause distress or go unnoticed and I offer three here, born from the fussiness that comes from a lifetime of teaching Latin. First, as I noted above, words that are used more than 500 times are given a special section, where pronouns and possessive adjectives (think meus, mea, meum) are fully declined. This seems unnecessary to me, since anyone using this book will not need this kind of elementary help. Second, Bergdorf follows the presentation of vocabulary found in the OLD when the word occurs there, but he brings over its inconsistency in the presentation of lexical forms, which can be confusing to those new to the language. We have, for instance, “caro, ~nis,” but then “cor, cordis,” “gratia, ~iae,” but then “miseria, ~ae.” Principal parts of verbs likewise are inconsistently presented: “propono ~onere,” but then “converto ~tere,” and then, “credo ~ere.” Third, and more seriously for the reader, the running vocabulary, which, as I noted above, is welcome and useful, suffers from two bad formatting decisions. Each word that is glossed is followed in the text by a number which corresponds to the word in the running vocabulary below, but the corresponding numbers in the running vocabulary are so small that it is difficult to find them. Furthermore, the translations of the words are presented in a bold type to which one’s eyes, in reading, are naturally drawn, whereas it would have made more sense to have the Latin in bold type to make it easier to find the word in the notes.
The intended readership of this book is unclear, as the subtitle of the book, A Latin Reader’s Edition, attests. Does the word “Latin” in the title modify “reader” or “edition?” Is this a Latin edition of the Confessions for people who who actually read Latin (e.g. professional classicists, theologians), or for those who want to try to read it in Latin (e.g. students, lay readers of Augustine with some Latin)? My question is only partly tongue-in-cheek, for Bergdorf does not address the question directly, and it is a real one. Experienced readers of Latin, either individually or in, say, a graduate seminar, will find this book most helpful and enjoyable, but teachers of undergraduate classes who consider adopting it as a textbook should think hard—the lack of grammatical help means that many instructors will feel the need to supplement it with something (though the number of grammatical commentaries in print is not large). On the other hand, since Augustine’s Latin is generally not too difficult, the book could be fruitfully used as a sight text for in-class reading.
Bergdorf has covered books I-IX, the autobiographical part, of the Confessions in this volume. I trust that we will see fairly soon the more difficult books X-XIII in a second edition.