Aaron Poochigian is the translator of a new edition of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. Poochigian's other translations include Aristophanes: Four Plays. He lives in New York City.
Q: What inspired you to write this new translation of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations?
A: After a dark time in my life, I was looking for some form of meditation that would calm my hyperactive mind. I tried several different kinds, including transcendental meditation. I could make no headway with them.
That’s when I decided to reread Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. I had read it before in Greek, in graduate school, but I was too young then to appreciate its wisdom. Once I had a wider range of experiences, both good and bad ones, the work struck me as profound and soothing.
I love the lessons in it: that, say, my own happiness is in my control and that I must accept, with gratitude, all that happens to me in my life.
Q: How would you compare your translation with those of previous translators?
A: Once I had started my own translation of Meditations, I did a survey of the preceding translations. There were three types: the outdated and alienating, the passionless, and the oversimplified.
The first group consists of archaic translations that are now in the public domain. They use, “thee” and “thou,” for example, and are lofty in their diction. Those are wrong in that Marcus does not use an elevated style in Meditations. He speaks familiarly to himself and even deploys slang works, for semen and feces, for example.
The passionless translations, such as that by Hammond, bring over Marcus’ philosophy but leave out Marcus’ religious fervor for the doctrine he propounds.
The oversimplified translations, such as the one by Hays, break Marcus’ long and often elegant sentences down into shorter sentences. Which is to say, these translations dumb Meditations down. They do not even try to capture Marcus’ style.
Q: How did your background as a poet influence your translation?
A: Meditations is my first translation of prose. Still, my instincts were that of a poet. When I was still deciding whether I would make my own translation of Meditations, I read and reread Marcus’ Ancient Greek purposefully, to determine what would sustain “charge” (or “excitement”).
I came to the conclusion that it was voice. Meditations is polyphonic. In addition to the voices of the authors Marcus quotes and those of hypothetical actors and orators, there are the three main voices: Marcus the demanding instructor, Marcus the vulnerable aspirant, and Marcus the whiny objector.
I then attempted to make every sentence, every phrase these three characters utter, as charged and poignant as I could.
Q: What lessons do you think Marcus Aurelius has for us today?
A: I have found Meditations to be particularly helpful when it comes to recognizing and ignoring distractions. What with our smart phones constantly beeping at us and advertisements everywhere competing for our attention, there are even more distractions out there for us than there were in Marcus’ day.
He trains himself to reject as “matters of indifference” everything that distracts him from what really matters: the cultivation of inner harmony and virtuous action. The intense focus that he exhibits and recommends is especially useful now in the Age of Distraction.
Marcus also insists that we can extract our misassessments about what has happened to us (say, that not getting a job is a bad thing). Nature, the sublime mover and shaker of the universe, is what sends a perceived misfortune our way, and Nature does no wrong. We should be grateful instead of disappointed and indignant.
Marcus again and again exhorts himself to reappraise events in his life that he at first perceived as unfortunate—that is, as harm or wrong that has been done to him. We should ideally be accepting, with gratitude, everything that happens to us in our lives because it comes from Nature.
Marcus’ efforts toward reappraisal dovetail perfectly with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the approach that most therapists today take with their patients.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Meditations was, I think, my last translation. For decades now I have divided my time between my original creative work and translation work. I regarded the translations as craft exercises from which I could steal ideas for my own work.
They also expanded my range by getting me to find ways in English to capture strong voices, those of Baudelaire and Marcus Aurelius, for example. My Sappho translation, in fact, required that I write “in drag” as a female.
Still, I think I have absorbed as much as I ever will from my translation work. So now I am focusing on my original work alone. To finally answer your question, I am working on a new collection of poems.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I found the translation of Meditations particularly mind-expanding because Marcus’ personality is so different from my own. He is as fervid as a fire-and-brimstone preacher. His relentless earnestness came to endear him to me. His words flash with the fire of the true believer. It was exciting to absorb a voice as powerful as his.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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