Consolation of Philosophy

Joel C. Relihan is Professor of Classics, Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts. He is also author of The Prisoner's Philosophy: Life and Death in Boethius' Consolation (The University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).

Relihan's edition of the Consolation offers both student and scholar a felicitous text, expertly translated from the original Latin, richly supplemented throughout with a critical apparatus, and generously embellished with explanatory notes for each prose and metric portion; he offers an Introduction of clear-sighted analysis, and an inclusive, text-referential glossary. Relihan's translation should now be the standard text for classroom use. . . . Relihan has performed a great service in his translation by attempting to translate the 'meters' with the sensibility of a poet as well as a Latinist, and it has made his version of Consolation that much more committed, it seems, to the intent of the original, and definitely a more compelling read. Relihan, as he himself states, has done '. . . what has not been done before in the long history of translation of Consolation into English, . . . [to] reproduce through English accents the rhythms and meters of the original poems' (xxviii). . . . The poetic sections of Consolation are not mere interludes but deliberate transitions in tenor and signification. By offering an English text that echoes the Latin in form, Relihan is offering the student of Consolation an English text that echoes the Latin in meaning as well. It is an offer neither scholar nor student should refuse. --June-Ann Greeley, New England Classical Journal