Strange Beauty: On Translating Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations”

Meditations is the emperor Marcus Aurelius’ private philosophical notebook. When it comes to translations of it, he has tended to be treated as a philosopher, a thinker, alone. When I sat down to re-read the work a few years back, though, I got the frisson I get when reading great literature, a frisson that the available English translations did not capture for me. There was a need, I felt, for a translation that highlights Marcus’ work as a literary stylist, too.

(Formal Equivalence vs. Dynamic Equivalence in the Craft of Translation.)

I’ll draw an analogy to show how my translation differs from the previous ones. The Parthenon, the most famous temple from antiquity, stands today on the Acropolis of Athens in gleaming white marble. It looks immaculate and formal. It looks “Classical.” In a way, it defines the “Classical.”

In fact, in Antiquity, the Parthenon was painted with bright colors: purples and oranges and yellows. Hewing to the cold, marmoreal conception of the “Classical,” translators have tended to give us renditions of Meditations that are upper-register and aloof. In my translation, I intentionally avoided that tone and strove to render Marcus’ words in living color.

At first the push in me to familiarize Meditations was instinctual. Later, after I had translated a swath of it, I discovered reasons why a cold and formal tone had struck me as wrong. First off, Marcus is writing to himself for himself, so there is no need for formality, no need for “thee” and “thou.” Marcus, in fact, writes so familiarly to himself that he is comfortable using lower-register diction. He, for example, uses slang words for feces and semen to “shock” himself into a contempt for bodily functions. He expresses admiration for Ancient Greek Old Comedy, which is notorious for its obscenity.

What further argues against a dispassionate tone is Marcus’ urgency. He is seeking a kind of salvation. The stakes are high, and, as he frequently reminds himself, death is imminent. It’s now or never here in the present moment (the only time we ever inhabit): 

An aloof rendering of that entry would translate the words but leave out the ardor.

Marcus started his literary education young. He received extensive training in Latin and Greek rhetoric under the guidance of Fronto and Herodes Atticus, two of the most prominent stylists of his day. His assignments consisted of writing prose and verse in a variety of voices and from varying perspectives. For decades, under these masters, he was in a kind of Creative Writing workshop.

The entries in Meditations show great range. Marcus indulges in wordplay and artful syntactic arrangements. Paradox appeals to him, and he utters addresses to his own soul and to Nature through the highly rhetorical figure of apostrophe. In one entry he even “transfuses” a human being and an olive by enduing the latter with human capacities. His tonal jolts can be modernistic: 

Marcus can wield words with violence, and he admires scathing travesties from the past. His own frequent critiques of different types of people range in tone from the gentler satire of Horace to the more savage sort written by Juvenal. 

Meditations is also rich in imagery, in similes and metaphors. Some scenes and figures recur, resulting in cycles of imagery involving such things as wrestling, a river, and the stars. Scenes that have to do with actors, for instance, pop up with varying significance. While they are held up as models of dishonesty and affectation in some entries, they serve as representative performers on the stage of life in others. The images that Marcus introduces come from both the classical literary tradition and his own experience. Meditations is far from being bookish—Marcus, in fact, exhorts himself to cast his books aside and focus exclusively on what he is experiencing in the present moment.

I found further justification for a literary translation of Meditations in Marcus’ innovative theory of strange beauty. He propounds a Stoic aesthetics, an aesthetics of the homely:

Marcus goes on to cite a lion’s furrowed brow and slaver dripping from a boar’s mouth as examples of this kind of beauty. In the Stoic conception, Nature, the living system of the universe, generates everything in existence. Though incidental “by-products” at one remove from Nature, things that are typically regarded as unappealing or even frightening become beautiful in the eyes of a perfected Stoic because they arise from the same source as more traditional beauties. In the same way as Marcus recognized beauty in what is not usually considered beautiful, I found beauty in his gruff exhortations and frank confessions. 

In Marcus’ hands, the literary techniques he deploys all work to make his philosophy not just theory, but a palpable ultimatum. I have here given the reasons behind my attempt to make a literary translation of Meditations. Whether or not the enterprise is successful—that’s up to you.

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