The text
This translation is made from the Salzburg printing of 1705, Erstlich Druckt zu Saltzburg, bey Melchior Han, two years after the book first appeared at Vienna and at Salzburg in 1703. The copy used is in the Bavarian State Library at Munich; a second Salzburg setting of the same year, differing only in spelling, has been consulted wherever a reading was in doubt. Every sentence has been read from the leaves of the old printing and not from any modern edition.
The voice
Abraham a Sancta Clara preached to the court of the Emperor and to the streets of Vienna, and he wrote as he preached: quickly, loudly, and with a joke always ready to turn into a warning. A translation that got his meaning right and lost his liveliness would have got him wrong. So the English here keeps his pace. His short, barbed anecdotes stay short. His catalogues of vices and absurdities stay whole, however long they run. And the refrain that closes so many of his little stories, O Narr!, is given every time as “O fool!”, because it is meant to be heard as a drumbeat.
His prose is also full of wordplay, rhyme, and proverb, the stock-in-trade of the baroque pulpit. Where a pun could be carried into English it has been, sometimes by finding a new pair of words to do the old work; where it could not, the sense is translated and a short note gives the German, so that the reader can see what the preacher was doing. No joke has been added that Abraham did not make.
The spelling and punctuation of 1705 have been modernised, and his long chains of clauses, strung together with the virgule (/), have been divided as English sense requires. Old coins, offices, and customs are put into plain English, with a note where the thing itself matters.
Scripture
Abraham quotes the Latin Vulgate constantly, often in a clipped or paraphrased form. The quotations are given in English in the Douay-Rheims Bible as revised by Bishop Challoner, the Vulgate in the English of the Catholic tradition, printed in italic within quotation marks. The notes give each reference, correct it where Abraham’s own is loose, and print his Latin as he quoted it. His quotations from the Fathers and the classical authors are treated the same way.
Hard things
Abraham was a man of his age, and some of his polemic is hard to read today. Nothing has been softened or left out. Where a passage needs its historical setting to be understood, a brief note supplies it.