Distinguished translator to discuss ‘Augustine, the Beloved Tradition, and the Literary Goof’

Distinguished translator will speak this month about the meaning of the Bible to the early Christians at the time of St. Augustine—when the Roman Empire was collapsing from the weight of foreign invasions in the Fourth and Fifth centuries AD.

Ruden, a visiting scholar at Brown University, will discuss “Augustine, the Beloved Tradition, and the Literary Goof.” The event will be Wednesday, Sept. 30, from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., in on the Ƶ Campus.

The event is free and open to the public.

Her talk will draw from her forthcoming book on Biblical translation, which will be published shortly by Alfred A. Knopf and will help readers reflect on the Bible’s original texts as the basis of translation traditions.

Ruden is the most distinguished and popular U.S. translator of the ancient classics and of the Bible and early Christian religious texts.

Her books include the celebrated reclamation of St. Paul from his critics, (2011); her translation ofthe (2008), which Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee called“a gift for which many will begrateful” and Garry Wills considered the best English translation since Dryden’s; and the forthcoming Music Inside the Whale: A Translator on the Beauty of the Bible and Confessions of St. Augustine.

She holds a Ph.D. in classical philology from Harvard University and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.

She has taught Latin, English, and writing at Harvard, Yale and the University of Cape Town, and has been a tutor for the South African Education and Environment Project, an education-enrichment nonprofit in Cape Town.She was a scholar in residence for three years at Yale Divinity School and a Guggenheim fellow.

Ruden appears at the invitation of Brian Domitrovic, visiting scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy.