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I'm presently reading a PG ebook of The Consolation of Philosophy and realizing it is great for me to read but the translation is hard reading to offer non-philosophers / non-scholars who visit my website.

What translations are available that are, without loss of faithfulness, easier for a 2018 reader to understand?

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  • Mine from my Classics courses was amazon.com/Consolation-Philosophy-Penguin-Classics/dp/… It is an old standard and so is now cheap.
    – user9166
    Dec 21, 2018 at 23:35
  • @jobermark Thanks for the added resource! At a glance, the reviews make Watts look more similar than different from the PG's H.R. James translation. By comparison with both of them, David Slavitt seems like a philosophical equivalent to The Message, of which it is said that someone came to Eugene Peterson and asked, "Are you the person who wrote the Bible?"
    – Christos Hayward
    Dec 29, 2018 at 14:06

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I found Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, tr. David R. Slavitt.

I've just barely glanced inside, but it reads like a fresh composition; the second paragraph on the back of the book reads, "Slavitt presents the reader with Boethius brought to vibrant, vigorous life, to a degree that makes all previous English versions seem pedantic and irrelevant..."

Now of course there must be some sort of flaws; I haven't read it and it may have the flaws that adherents of literal translation complain infest free translation (and it might in fact not be a free translation). However, the quick glance and the quotes chosen for critical acclaim do suggest that readability is a priority.

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