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Again, poet, classicist and translator based in New York City whose work has appeared in the Financial Times, the New York Review of Books and Poetry Magazine. His new translation of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditation is out now from Live Write Publishing. Aaron, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me. Okay, so Aaron, may I ask you what first drew you to the classics? I had
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Armo irrumque cano troiai qui primus aboris
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um And I had, yeah, the light became brighter for me, grass became greener, where I was sitting out front of the English department, and I just knew, oh, I’m gonna be a poet, and I need to learn ancient Greek and Latin. And so, yeah, ever since then, I have, for richer or for poorer, and usually for poorer, pursued that goal. And so, yes, I ended up getting a PhD in Classics, and then an MFA in Poetry.
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in order to, yes, fulfill both ends of that experience, both the creative half and the scholarly half. Very good. So I also noticed that your father is a philosopher and your mother is a literature teacher, a teacher of literature. And I’ve noticed also your book has your father uh dedicated. So did that influence you in your work? Very much.
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I love my father dearly. He died about eight years ago, but I respect him because he was a systematic philosopher. He was working to put the universe back together. um And so certainly I studied a great deal of philosophy when I was in undergraduate school and graduate school and I’m fascinated by it I have a great respect for it. But also in the translation, there is a little bit of rebellion against my father in that. um
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Yes, I am a literary person and not a philosopher. um He had a cool writing style, but he wrote like it was math and it was inaccessible to a lot of people. And so yes, that literary influence from my mother, I reach out to the audience and I’m willing to do anything I can to welcome them in and keep them excited. So yes, it’s interesting that you noticed that. Yes, I am in every way a combination of my mother and my father. Wonderful.
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I should mention personally that The Meditations is one of my favorite books. Marcus Aurelius is someone I generally look up to. I think he’s an example of leadership. For listeners who are coming to Marcus Aurelius for the first time, can you tell us who he was and how you first encountered Marcus? Yes! I first encountered Marcus Aurelius when I was in graduate school. I read The Meditations from beginning to end and I was excited about it for… um
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couple of different reasons, but primarily because he was a great Roman Emperor. He lived in the second century AD and he was the last of what were known as the five good emperors. Famously, Marcus Aurelius’ son Commodus, who became emperor after him, was a disaster and was killed by the Praetorian Guard. So Marcus was the last of the, in a way, the last of the really good emperors of Rome. And he was scrupulously dutiful.
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But what you can see in the meditations and in certain letters to mentors of Marcus that had been preserved, he was a reluctant emperor. He wanted to be a philosopher and he was drafted in a way into the line of dynastic succession in his teens um and subsequently went on, always very dutiful, to be a dutiful sort of um worker under the previous emperor Antinnaeus.
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Antoninus Pius, and then also was an outstanding emperor in his own right. The meditations, interestingly, very rarely talk about, Marcus very rarely talks about his duties as emperor, right? This is very much his private time. And I argue in the beginning of the book that like other Stoics, he had a daily practice and the evidence suggests that he had a morning practice. As soon as he woke up, he would
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repeat principles that he’d written down to himself. He tried to get them as concise as possible. And so certainly during that last decade when he was waging war in what’s now Austria at the northeastern edge of the empire against that background of war, yes, he was stealing this private time in the morning to add to his notebook and to try to move himself forward as a Stoic. so, but before we go further,
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Could you give a brief overview of Stoic philosophy for listeners who may be encountering it for the first time? Yes, it’s a large and expansive system, but I can try to give it in a nutshell. The message that hits me hardest, um and the second time I read it, I was all in as a Stoic. The first time I read it, I was romantic and I wanted big non-Stoic emotions. But now that I’m older and I’ve had some life experience, right? um
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his advice on how to deal with the past and the future and regrets um have been very useful. But in a nutshell, Stoicism maintains that your happiness is in your control. It’s entirely dependent on you and your internal assessments. We normally think of, not getting a job you applied for, that misfortune, right? As a bad thing that the outside world
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has imposed on us. But Marcus would say, first, nature is in charge of the universe and it is entirely good. Everything that it brings about for us in our lives is good for us, even if we don’t recognize it at the moment. And so we should be grateful. And I had a realization that confirmed Marcus’s, yes, what in
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understanding of nature. I did apply for a job and didn’t get it and I was down about it. But now when I reflect on that with the advantage of whatever age I have, I’m grateful I didn’t get that job. I wanted to be more of a writer and less of an academic. And so that failure ended up pushing me ahead in my literary career. um And so, yes, I’ve come around to that philosophy. It’s been he’s rubbed off on me.
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I still wouldn’t call myself a stoic. um have trouble joining any group whatsoever. um But certainly when I was translating and spending so much time with Marcus, that message about my happiness being in my control is on me. Certainly soaked in and it has been beneficial to me subsequently. Well, that’s what I like also. I like the dichotomy of control. What is within my control and what is not within my control.
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Proheresis. But yeah, the choice, the choice, the mental choice that you have to react to the external world, to the fantisma. Right. Yeah, I, I understand it theoretically. And once in a while I can practice it and I feel good about it. But I’m very far from being a stoic sage. Yes. And so there is that split in stoicism between the theoretical and the practical. And Marcus is aware of it. um
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When he lays out a perfected Stoic, a Stoic age, it’s an ideal and a hypotheticality. He doesn’t name any individual as an example of a perfected Stoic. And he acknowledges in a number of sections that sustaining that mindset is well nigh impossible. And so he says, it’s okay if most of your actions are in accordance with Stoic philosophy.
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most of your actions are just and there will be occasional lapses as well. He also acknowledges that we can take breaks, whether for respite, food, drinking, sleep, but he says they have a limited time and you shouldn’t drag them out um longer than they need to be. And so he does it in another section. He is extreme and he says every single exertion we do, everything we exert ourselves to do should serve
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some purpose. I that is, I mean, I’m impressed with that idea and I wish I could reach it, but I can’t imagine a living human being um achieving that. Right. Yeah, it is a very high ideal indeed. So there was the Marquamanic Wars and also the Antonine Plague devastating the empire during the reign, during his reign. Does any of that anguish and his stoicism show up?
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while dealing with these events in the meditations. Yes, both of them show up in interesting ways. again, the medit… Yes. And how did he deal with them? know, it shows up. And so first, Macromannic Wars and then the Antonine Plague. Certainly, the wars show up in meditations, but less than you would think. Two of the 12 books, books two and three,
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actually have a heading that set them at different military outposts in what’s now Austria, one a fort on the Danube and another that was the capital of the Roman province of Upper Pannonia called Carnuntum. And so we are confident that those two books at least, and I think the entire meditations were written during his last 10 years while he was waging war. Marcus served with a
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His co-emperor, his adopted brother Lucius Verus, for a few years, and then Lucius Verus died, presumably of the Antonine Plague, and Marcus had to go and wage the wars himself. He was out of Rome for years at a time. And the most poignant way in which the war creeps into the meditations is… One second, I need to get a drink of water.
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where he imagines um corpses decapitated, arms, legs, heads chopped off. And he compares that to what a human being does socially when he rejects something that has happened to him in the universe, or he is cruel to his fellow humans. And so Stoicism has a reputation for being kind of an aloof, dis-passionate
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unaffectionate, unfeeling philosophy. oh But what we see in the meditations actually militates against that. Marcus sees himself as being obliged to be kind to all of his fellow humans because they’re fellow citizens of this theoretical Commonwealth oh called, I translated it, it’s koinonia in Greek. I translated it as the human Commonwealth. But even beyond that, there’s another layer
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in which he talks about a concept called oikaiosis. It comes from the Greek word oikos for house. There’s a Greek yogurt that has that name, oikaiosis. And that means, housification. How would you translate it? Identification. That is becoming so familiar with your fellow humans that they are like family to you. um Good. And so he uses then that image of the war and decapitation.
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to drive home what humans do socially, mostly to themselves. The damage is mostly to themselves. The Antonine Plague shows up in Marcus’ biography, certainly, in that there was a rebel named Avidius Cassius, who was in the province of Syria, Palestine, south of where Marcus was in Austria, and he claimed that he’d heard that Marcus had died
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of the Antonine Plague and declared himself emperor, and there was um brief tension between them before um eventually a loyal guardsman cut off Avidius’ head and gave it to Marcus um as proof of death. But the evidence still suggests that Marcus wanted to forgive Avidius. He wanted to act on his principles, um simply that humans never purposefully do the wrong thing.
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They can do things that are illegal, right? They can knock over a 7-Eleven, but they persuaded themselves that that’s the right thing to do. They’re poor and they need the money or whatever, right? And so he then says, when humans are misguided in that way, it is your duty either to teach them or to tolerate them. Next, moving on to the Antonite, we’re still talking about the Antonine Plague. That shows up also in one of my favorite short sections in the meditation.
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in which he describes grains of frankincense being offered on an altar, burned on an altar. And the ancient Greeks and Romans both believed that things that smell good, like frankincense, they ward off the contagion in the Antonine Plague. So that’s another place in the meditations where the Antonine Plague sort of asserts itself. And we can find a parallel with outside history.
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But we can imagine how stoicism would have played also in eh dealing with these very big issues. accepting… mean, stoicism would require people who were dying of the Antonine Plague to accept that as a good thing that was given to them out of nature. I have a hard time believing that. But in fact, the good things…
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that Marcus talks about, aren’t material possessions. All material possessions and even your own life and body are matters of indifference. What Stoics focus on and what Marcus focuses on are the virtues, with justice being the king and then tolerance, for example, subservient to it. There’s a whole hierarchy of virtues. And in fact, the whole meditations is quite hierarchical on
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in terms of the levels of existences from humans down to material objects with animals and plants in the middle. And that’s a hallmark of the classical world, these hierarchies. Right. But when I read Marcus Aurelius, I hear a lot of Epictetus. There’s a lot of Epictetus. Yeah. Marcus quotes him more than any other stoic authority. He was the stoic closest in time to Marcus. lived about
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50, 60 years before Marcus Aurelius. um And there are some, well, a fair number of parallels between Epictetus’s discourses. We have four of the eight books of Epictetus’s discourses have come down to us, um including one of my favorite characters in the meditation. He’s known to scholars as the Objector, just a voice that speaks up. And he’s almost, it’s almost
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comical, right? He’s the instructor, Marcus the instructor’s patsy. His job is to say something naive or something wrong so that the dominant voice, Marcus the instructor, can step in and correct him. And there are almost jokes involving the objector. He becomes comical because he’s whiny and he always says the wrong thing. I fell in love with the various voices in meditations. And that’s, fact, what prompted me
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to do my translation. felt that they hadn’t been captured as distinct voices in previous translations. Right. So that comes to our next question. What motivated you to add a new translation of the meditations? There are certainly many, many translations of the meditations. um I felt there was a need for a literary translation of Marcus Aurelius. The previous translations have emphasized him as a philosopher. Also,
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a number of, there are different, I see two different classes of previous translations of the meditations. One of them is overly formal and classical, right? And here’s the analogy I use. You imagine the temple, the Parthenon on Athens with that beautiful white marble, right? And people get this conception of the classical that it’s formal and aloof and cold like that marble, right? But in fact, the Parthenon was painted with bright color.
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It was not this cold aloof, marmorial construction, but rather gaudy. And so I wanted to translate the meditations, as I said, into living color. And then there is another group of translations, which oh in order to make the meditations more accessible to the reader, um simplify the grammar and the sentences, and as I see it, simplify the sentiment. uh
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frustrated with those translations just because they seem to underestimate the reader. They dumb things down for the reader. And I don’t want to do that. And especially since I’m doing a lit, I was doing a literary translation when Marcus gives you a long sentence, I felt an obligation, right, to translate that long sentence and not break it down into smaller units. And so I wanted to capture Marcus’s um literary style. And he is, he has a lot of range.
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he studied under the two most prominent stylists in Latin and in Greek in his day, one named Fronto, who taught him Latin, and then another famous um orator, Herodes Atticus, who taught him Greek. And so from four or five years old, he was writing creatively in Latin and Greek. And certainly all of that training shows up in the meditations, which he wrote.
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roughly in the 10 years before his death. All right, so since we’re talking about the translation, I have a question here. You translate this passage in Book 4. your vacation in those inner little acres of yourself. That image is so vivid and almost casual. Can you walk us through what was happening in your mind as a translator when you arrived at that? Yes. um The word that is used for both for translation, sorry,
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The word that’s used both for vacation and for an inner retreat um is the ancient Greek word anachoresis. um Going back or going up is how we translate it. It’s related to the English word for, well, outdated English word for a hermit, an anchorite, someone who lives alone in a cave and, yes, um meditates. um And so, yes, as I was translating that, I wanted to get
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both the meanings that he was using. so there were opportunities for both. It can also just mean vacation, right? Going to the shore. so Marcus again and again emphasizes that where you are doesn’t matter. You shouldn’t be waiting for just the right setting and just the right time in order to begin improving your life, in order to retreat into yourself and find what’s happening there, right? You need to be able to do that.
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anywhere, right? Even on the battlefield or in a fortress in Upper Pannonia. And so, yes, I wanted to emphasize in Anachoresis that he’s using the first sense metaphorically for a vacation and the second is the one that he intends. And he inherited that meaning of Anachoresis from a work called Plato’s Theotetus. And that’s interesting. Marcus has been called an eclectic Stoic.
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I like to think of him rather as an open-minded Stoic. And so rather than cleaving to the great um Stoic authorities like Epictetus, whom he does quote a fair amount, he brings in Aristotle, he brings in Theophrastus, he brings in Plato. There are some earlier philosophers, they’re called the pre-Socratic philosophers, Heraclitus and Empedocles. He brings them in as well. And so that made me, in a sense, the fact that he’s willing to be eclectic.
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that he’s not going to be doctrinaire about his stoicism, but he’s going to bring in whatever ideas are useful for him in his ethical project. I came to respect him all the more for that. He does not have, as one might expect in a stoic, a rigid, intolerant mindset, but it’s rather open and accepting of ideas from anywhere.
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I so many interpreted as though like the idea of retrieving into the mind and the mind is the garden, right? Because the idea of the citadel, the fortress and to retrieve within the soul. Yes, the fortress, the fortress image is another place where the war shows up and he may well have written that in a fortress. But again, again, he says, and this is the ideal of the perfected stoic, right? That person would be using what he calls that
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Hegemonikon in Greek, I translate it as the stock translation, is the ruling power. And this is a bit of the divine which has been given to us, a bit of divine rationality that has been given to us. And our obligation then is to cultivate that Hegemonikon. And one of the ways we do that is through uh anachoresis, retreating into your cell.
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And um yes, I find that fascinating that we each have this uh logos, a portion of the logos, which is divine rationality inside of us. m I, as a poet, um I’m not always seeking rationality when I am writing. But Marcus, in many ways, um won me over, right, in terms of this.
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oh divine rationality running the universe. And it makes perfect sense. We humans, we have the logos inside of us. And so we’re in a way that allows us to interact with it and cultivate it, right? And in the lower species, in Marcus’s opinion, don’t have that faculty. And so the universe has singled humans out, right? To be able to perfect ourselves.
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to be aware of all that we have received. should be grateful. All of the things we have, the gifts we have received from the universe. Right. Makes me think a garden is a perfect place for a poet. Yeah, would. I wish it’s still cold. I’m in New York City and it’s another cold day here. I’m eager. At least you retrieve within the mind. Yes. Yeah, I’m. We’ll see.
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Meditation and I have a long and complicated relationship. I have a kind of hyperactive, slightly spastic mind. And so it’s really hard to tame. It’s really hard for me to control. um But I tried a bunch of different kinds of meditation when I was coming out of a dark time in my life. And I couldn’t do Buddhist transcendental meditation just because I was unable to keep my mind empty. Right? um
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But you’re told, I know, I may be misrepresenting it, right? You’re told when you’re meditating that way, the work is bringing your mind back, back to that void that’s at the core. But I wasn’t any good at it. I tried another kind of meditation called Shinrin-yoku in Japanese, it’s forest bathing. And I did some running, I did my forest bathing in Central Park, like a good New Yorker, I guess we can call that a forest. But at the same time, yes, I was looking into
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the meditation that Marcus does. And that was appealing to me in that it’s, I’m confident he set aside time, I think in the morning, However many minutes, 10, 15, 20 minutes, right? And then you could make it longer and longer. And then eventually if you become a perfected Stoic, then you’re always in that mindset, right? And so, but yes, I’m very far from getting there. But Marcus’s form of meditation, I tried
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And it was uh pretty effective for me. But he makes clear when you’re doing your meditation, and it’s interesting because he had his notebook. I think he wrote down what he realized after the meditation session. But he says you shouldn’t be dependent on any books, right? He actually talks about book reading as a kind of the analogy he uses the word dipsa, which can mean alcoholism, thirst or alcoholism in ancient Greek. And so it’s a thirsty dependence. Like you’re an alcoholic. You’re dependent on these books.
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and he forbids them um in book two, any books to support his meditation. It has to be just his mind working. And I understand because then you’re dependent on some physical thing outside of you, right? If you’re referring to books all the time. Mm-hmm. Now I see. So Marcus uses my mental Mori, the awareness of death. Remember, you’re going to die not with fear, but almost as a motivating force. He says things like,
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inevitable death is hanging over you. How does mortality function philosophically in his thinking? Marcus uses it as I see it in two ways. And they’re not entirely consistent, I’ll confess, right? The first way he uses death, as you said, the memento mori, I’ll just get a drink of water here.
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is to impart a sense of urgency to him. He says, as you said in that quote, inevitable death is hanging over you, right? And it’s sort, mean, he combines that, that you, yes, that death is inevitable, so he needs to hurry, right? You only have a certain amount of time before you die. Marcus sees the events of the universe most often, he talks about them as being deterministic, right? That cause makes a fact, which becomes a cause, which makes an effect.
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and goes on forever. But there is wiggle room, right, in that we humans, this is the origin of what would become the concept of free will in Western philosophy. um can’t prevent the fact that we have to die. Everybody has to die. That’s our destiny, right? But Marcus would say, we can decide how we die, whether we do it well or badly. And the way to die well is to die grateful.
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Right? That’s, yeah, that’s the way to do it. But he’s also including, this is a common theme in both ancient Greek and Latin literature. When he talks about the present moment, he’s using the seize the day formula or seize the present moment formula. And the threat of death as he talks about it, the urgency gives all the more pressure, right, to get things done, to make yourself right here in the present moment. And then elsewhere, um
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in a number of sections, um Marcus says that your death is just another, it’s nothing to be afraid of, right? And so he has the urgency on the one side and then the other side, he says death is nothing to be afraid of. He says you went through puberty, you became an adult, you got married, you reached middle age, now you’re an old age, and the last phase is death, right? And just as everybody has to go through puberty, so everyone has to die, right?
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and you should accept that. then also, because our material bodies are material things, they are objects of indifference. so we should be, he uses, I translate it as, we should be nonchalant, right, when death comes. And Stoics, um uncomfortable to talk about, but it’s true, Stoics were comfortable with suicide. Marcus lays out the conditions in which, under which someone should commit suicide.
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He talks about obstacles a lot, that’s why CEOs and businessmen really like the meditation. There are obstacles and you turn them into opportunities to innovate. But if he says you’re so blocked by obstacles on every way around that you can’t make any headway while performing any of the virtues, then you should kill yourself. um And it seems… um
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There aren’t that many sources on the death of Marcus Aurelius, but an authoritative one, Diogenes Laertius, says that Marcus refused food and liquids um when he was 58 and dying, and thus hastened, in a sense, his demise. And thus he seemed to have practiced what he preached when it came to death. If I remember well, his last words were, the sun is setting, go to my son.
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He is the next right? He was saying it’s my time. I’m going to go. That was his last words. Yeah. So he was still conscious and yet he’s here on a verge of death thinking about his duties really. In retrospect, Komotis was a very bad choice. I have great respect for Marcus Aurelius and you know, I understand he he he and his wife um Marcus begat 14 children on his wife Faustina.
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And only one son survived and four daughters survived. Every other child died. The infant mortality rate was very high in Rome. And also there was the Antonine Plague. And so, yes, he really suffered with that. And so I understand he chose his only son to be his successor. In a sense, how could he not? Right? And he also wanted the empire to have some continuity from one emperor to another.
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But historians, when I read biographies of Marcus Aurelius, they are very down on him for choosing Commodus when he should have chosen someone else. That’s probably one of his biggest mistakes. the meditation, stoicism has had a remarkable revival in recent years. We got Ryan Holiday, Tim Ferriss, entire self-help movements. Why do you think Marcus specifically has exploded in popularity? What does he offer that, let’s say, Seneca, a big…
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Epictetus does not. He more than um certainly Seneca and Epictetus talks about everything other than you communing with your mind or you using the present moment to do virtues, right? He sees all of everything else as a distraction. And I would argue
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There are even there are far, far more distractions now in the digital age in the 21st century than there were in Marcus’s day. Right. I mean, we are tied to our phones and every time they beep, we have to look at them. Right. um And so that is one of the reasons why I see Marcus as distinguishing himself from the other Stoics and being more relevant um to the current
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H. Also, Marcus, like Epictetus, um well, I said, um distractions over and over again. Also, though, his philosophy has a lot in common with what is called cognitive behavioral therapy, the dominant approach that therapists take with their patients right now.
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um I confess I’m seeing a shrink and she uses CBT as well. And we had a lot of good conversations about Marcus Aurelius, my therapist and um I. so Marcus again and again says, you and this is at first it may. First, I found it difficult to accept. It seemed that other the things that happened to me were wrong, that people that were doing things to me were being cruel or were wrong, right? But we have to accept.
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all of that in Marcus’s philosophy and then make an adjustment, an internal adjustment um to accept what we saw as a bad deed. And that allows it then not to have any emotional repercussions inside of you. I learned how liberating that is, for example, when I came to accept and even be grateful for the fact
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that I didn’t get that academic job, for example. so, yes, partly because it deals with this, meditations deals with distractions and there are distractions everywhere. That’s why he’s more popular. And then also because his philosophy dovetails so well um with cognitive behavioral therapy. It’s like a self help cognitive behavioral therapy. You can do it on your own without a therapist.
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In my opinion, I think he’s also great for leadership. I mean, he is a great example in a sense, like he’s right in the middle of a corrupted empire and he’s there and he’s trying to be good and he’s trying to be good and reminds himself to be good and meditations all the time. And he talks about how to deal with things, how to deal with bad people, how to deal with individuals that are ungrateful, unkind.
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Stupid foolish, know what I mean? Like there’s a big long section about that. So I think it’s great also for For just that for leadership. You see a leader who’s actually trying to be good. Yeah You’re right. That is admirable. I I have thought a bit about why CEOs and business people like the meditation so much it’s kind of a cult favorite among them and Certainly for that reason I like it like if these CEOs and business people
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are pushing themselves to become good. That I’m, yeah, that I’m all over it. um Certainly. But yes, it’s, yes, certainly um it has been particularly uh popular. I mean, I’m still trying to wrap my mind around its popularity. And I’m a classicist and I was an academic for a while. Classes are kind of amused when some work they study suddenly somehow becomes popular.
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with non-specialists, right? m But I would like to say I’m not uncomfortable with that. as a literary artist and a scholar, I try to bridge that gap between the ancient Greek that most people can’t read and then some book that is going to capture all of that and also, yeah, invite new readers in. I think there’s just a lot of universal themes also in it.
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As we said, there’s always this constant struggle. see Marcus really is struggling also throughout the book and there’s that constant struggle and how he’s trying to deal with it. I think that’s those universal ideas that make it classic and everybody’s reading it because of just that. He’s an ordinary man with extraordinary responsibilities and he has so much and he’s dealing with it. I think that’s when I read it, that’s what I admire about him. You know, he’s just a man who’s trying to deal.
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with so much. he’s not entirely, you’re right, I liked it because the humanity comes through, right? He’s not entirely consistent. As I’ve said on the one hand, right, he recognizes as a Stoic, he’s obliged to get along with everybody, right? To be, yes, um and to even make them family members, right? That’s an ideal towards which he strove. But in many other sections, we see him as downright cranky, right?
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He’s going off on the different types of people, right, whom he can’t respect because they can’t live in accordance with nature. And rather than seeing that as a flaw or an inconsistency, I see that as expressing Marcus’s humanity. Humans, we live in a state of inconsistency. We have ideals, we want to fulfill them, right? But on the other side, there are all the frustrations in life um and their own prejudices which we’re trying to overcome. And so,
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You get to see all of that in meditations. I mentioned that meditations has a lot in common with CBT. um And I curiously sitting there listening to Marcus talk with his various voices, right? I felt as I was translating that like I was Marcus’s therapist, that I was his shrink. I talk about in the introduction, the meditations as a kind of psycho drama. It’s a school of philosophy that I’m sorry, a school of psychology.
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that started in the 20s and sort of boomed in the 60s and 70s, in which you use drama, you theatrically have patients play out situations in their lives, or even play out, for example, some emotion that is inside them. And so we see in the different characters in meditations, I call them the instructor, the aspirant, and the objector, those are all aspects of Marcus Aurelius, as I see it.
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in a psychodrama, trying to work things out, working towards consistency and enlightenment. And how do you bring them out? How do you? Oh, tonally with different translations. The instructors, um that’s the first thing I did when I sat down to figure out how I was going to translate this and how I was going to sustain what I call charge or excitement in the work. I recognized that it was in the voices, right?
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The instructor is a gruff know-it-all, right? And he is really rough. this is, well, important, covered in different ways. He addresses the aspirant, the Marcus who’s the learner and trying to become a perfected Stoic. He addresses him as you, as you would expect, but it’s Marcus talking to himself. And that’s the great trick of meditations, that you, right? In that a reader can’t help but take that you,
40:27
that Marcus is using, he’s referring to himself as referring to oneself. The instructor, sounds like he’s speaking directly, immediately to the reader. And that’s another reason for the work’s popularity, right? This immediate, what seems like, though he was originally writing for himself, and I’m certain of it, right? On this ambiguous you that reaches out and welcomes in everybody and makes everybody an aspirant who is moving towards stoic enlightenment.
40:57
Right? um And so the tone of the aspirant, he speaks in about 10 % of the sections. He uses an I. That character I came to love because unlike the instructor, the aspirant can be vulnerable. Right? He can even say, I’m so frustrated. I’m still not living my life in accordance with stoic principles. I’m trying really hard, but I haven’t reached that yet. And that humanizes as I see it.
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the whole meditations project. um So there were those two voices and I would say they’re almost opposite, right? The gruff instructor and vulnerable aspirant. I’ve mentioned the objector already and then Marcus frequently quotes famous um poets and writers, Euripides, Plato, Homer. And so I realized that the meditations that I was reading it is polyphonic, as I put it. It has many voices and
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They each have their distinct tone, each of the writers and the instructor and the aspirant. And so it was a lot of me listening, um hearing voices, if you will, listening to the tone of the various passages and making them distinct and also ideally poignant when they reach the Okay. So that brings me to a question. How should a first time reader approach the meditations? Where should they start?
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That’s interesting. have been talking to a lot of people to whom I bought my translation or to whom I gave copies of the translation. I’m very interested in reader response. um I would suggest um some of them read the whole thing from beginning to end, and that’s great. But in terms of a personal project, each of the entries is rich in its own way. And so I would suggest
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sitting down at the same time every day like Marcus did, right? And just working through two or three sections at a time, even if they’re very short, right? To use them as the catalyst, if you will, for meditations. And so I would advise taking it slow and doing two or three books at a time. Also, there’s no reason to go in order. You can start with any book you want, um frankly.
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um As the book has come down to us, and I think this is the way Marcus left it, I have a reason for that, um the um themes recur frequently, but unpredictably, right? And so you start anywhere, um you will be, yes, able to move on from there. There isn’t a linear progression in the meditations toward anything. So you can certainly start anywhere. But I guess um the best, what I see is,
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is closest to an introduction to the meditations actually starts the beginning of book two. He lays out the stoic universe in sections 2.2 and 2.3. There is that opening book, which I like very much, but it isn’t rigidly stoic. He’s giving gratitude in that section to people who were inspirational to him during his life, right? Whose influence he respects. He starts the rigid
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stoic philosophy, the theorizing, um with book two. And so I’d advise readers to start with book two and do sections 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3 as an introduction to the work. All right, wonderful. So what is your next translation project? Do you have any other projects? I am a poet um as well as a translator. And I’ve done, I love translating.
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Right? It just comes naturally to me. It’s one of the things I can just groove on forever. Right? But I’ve decided this is my last translation. um I think I’m done. I’m going to focus. I’m going to focus exclusively on my own original work. When I first started doing translation when I was 18, I saw them as craft exercises, right? In which you have, I mostly have translated poetry, right? Which you have the words there and you have to get those
45:15
Yeah, figure out how to translate those. But you also have to figure out the vessel, the form into which that poetry is going to go. Or in meditations, for example, there was this is a formal or some formal originality on my part. Marcus is big on lists. And so I lay them out in list format. And readers had told me they find the meditations much more accessible that way. But still, I’ve sought translation as a craft exercise, a way to work on my
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technique as a writer. um While yes, so I saw it originally as something that would help me in my original work. And so I have to, I feel I have to be done with those exercises and focus wholly on my own work again. But you know, who knows, I may end up doing another translation. We shall see. I’ve been spending a lot of time with classical Chinese, teaching myself slowly classical Chinese and
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It’s good. I feel like I’m done with Greek and Latin. I’ve done enough. And so I need to do something to keep things fresh for me. And so I translated a lot of classical Chinese poetry. We’ll see if that ever comes out. But it’s been good for me. That’s great. So finally, Aaron, where can people follow you and buy your book? Oh, got it. Yes, I do interact with social media a fair amount. I’m on Twitter at just my last name, at Puchigian. I’m on Facebook with my name, Aaron Puchigian. I’m the only one in the world.
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Trust me, nobody else wants that name. um And then yes, you can find bookstores. um Yes, Barnes and Noble, for example, or The Strand, and a number of independent bookstores. And then you can find it online at WWNorton and of course, Amazon. It’s readily available. All right, wonderful. Thank you, Aaron, for being here. It was a pleasure speaking to you. Thank you for having me. This is a great talk. Thank you. All right, thank you.