Translation

Who will give me to find rest in you? Who will give me that you come into my heart and intoxicate it, that I may forget my evils and embrace my one good — you? What are you to me? Have mercy, that I may speak. What am I to you, that you should command that you be loved by me through your mercies, O Lord my God? — "You are my salvation," say so, that I may hear. Will you be angry with me if I do not do this, and will you threaten me with great miseries? Is it a small thing if I do not love you? Alas for me! Tell me: behold, the ears of my heart are before you, O Lord; open them and say to my soul, "You are my salvation." I will run after that voice and lay hold on you. Do not hide your face from me: let me die rather than not see it; let me not perish until I have seen it.

Great are you, O Lord, and greatly to be praised: great is your power, and the number of your wisdom cannot be counted. And man would praise you, some portion of your creature — and man who carries about his mortality, carrying the witness of his sin and the sign that you resist the proud — and yet man would praise you, some portion of your creature. You excite the delight of praising you because you made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. Give me, Lord, to know and to understand whether it is first to call upon you or to praise you, and whether to know you is first or to invoke you. But who invokes you not knowing you? For one thing may be called for another. Or are you rather called that you might be known? How shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe without a preacher? And they shall praise the Lord who seek him; for those who seek find him, and those who find shall praise him. I will seek you, O Lord, calling on you, and I will call on you believing in you; for you have been proclaimed to us. My faith calls on you, O Lord, which you have given me and have breathed into me by the humanity of your Son and by the ministry of your preacher.

What then is my God? What, I ask, except the Lord God? For who is Lord besides the Lord? Or what god besides our God? Most high, most good, most mighty, almighty, most merciful and most just, most secret and most present, most beautiful and very strong, stable and incomprehensible, immutable, changing all things, never new, never old, renewing all things; leading the proud into antiquity who know it not; always acting, always at rest; gathering yet needing nothing; bearing, filling, and protecting; creating and nourishing; perfecting, seeking; humane, owing nothing and giving what is due, losing nothing. And what have we said, my God, my life, my holy sweetness, or what does anyone say when speaking of you? Woe to those who are silent about you, for the talkers are mute.

Yet speak with me at your mercy, with me, earth and ashes; speak, for behold your mercy is not like a man — the one I mock — to whom I speak. And perhaps you will laugh at me, but turn and have pity on me. For what is it I desire to say, Lord, except that I do not know whence I have come into this life I now call mortal life or vital mortality? I do not know. And I have received the consolations of your mercies as I heard from the parents of my flesh, from the time and manner in which you formed me; for I do not remember it myself. Thus I received consolations, whether the hands of my mother or my nurses filled their breasts to me, not that they withheld nourishment but that through them you gave me food in infancy, your care and riches arranged to the depths of things. You also gave me a will not to be further (a will to resist?), or rather that very thing came into me and succeeded infancy; it did not depart — for where did it go? and yet it was no longer what it had been.

For their good was my good from them, not as coming from them but through them: for all good things come from you, God, and from my God all my salvation entirely. I noticed this afterward as you cried to me through those very things which you give within and without, with nothing lacking to you. You love and do not burn with passion; you are zealous and secure; you repent and do not grieve; you are angry yet tranquil; you change works but not purpose; you receive what you find and you have never lost; you are never needy and you rejoice in gains; you are never greedy and do not exact usury. Everything is superabundant to you, so that you owe nothing, and who has anything that is not yours? You repay debts.

I was an infant who could not speak, but already I was a child who spoke. And I remember this, and afterwards I noticed from whom I learned to speak. It was not that the older men taught me by giving words in some fixed order, as subsequently they taught letters; but I myself by the mind you gave me, O my God, when I wished by varied groans and voices and varied motions of the limbs to utter the sensations of my heart so that they might be made to obey my will — though I could not say all that I wished nor to whom I wished all things. I thought by memory: when they called something and, according to that sound, moved the body toward the thing, I saw and learned that they named that thing by that sound when they wished to show it. That they wished this, was revealed by the motion of the body, as by natural words of all peoples, which are made by face and nod of the eyes and the action of other members and the sound of the voice indicating a desire of the soul to seek, to have, to reject, or to flee. Thus words in various sentences placed in their several places and heard often as signs of things I gradually gathered them, and when my desires were now tamed in those signs, I began to utter them with my mouth; by these signs I communicated the tokens of the desires I was to declare with those among whom I lived; and having entered more deeply into the stormy society of human life, I hung on the authority and nod of my parents and of the elders of men.

Brief notes and clarifications (step by step)

• The passage is from Augustine's Confessions (Book I) and describes his early spiritual longing ("rest in you"), the paradox of wanting God yet being unable to love without God's mercy, and the famous sentence "our heart is restless until it rests in you."
• "Inebriate it" or "intoxicate it" is Augustine's vivid image for God's overpowering presence that removes the appetite for other (sinful) pleasures so the soul may cling to the one Good.
• "Ears of my heart" is a biblical/Patristic image: Augustine asks God to open his inner understanding (heart) so his soul can hear the divine word "You are my salvation."
• The repeated questions about whether one should call upon God or praise him first (invocation vs. knowledge/praise) lead to the theological point that faith and preaching (the proclamation of God) enable people to seek and find God.
• The long list of divine attributes compresses classical Christian theology: God is simultaneously transcendent, immanent, immutable yet renewing, merciful yet just, the source of all goods.
• The final section describes how a child learns language: by observing adults, hearing sounds associated with actions or objects, and gradually connecting signs (gestures, sounds) with desires — Augustine uses this to show that even our natural learning is ordered by God’s gift of mind.
• The manuscript you provided contains many corruptions and misprinted clusters; I have smoothed them into a coherent English rendering following the sense of Augustine’s familiar Latin text.

If you want, I can provide a more literal, line‑by‑line (word‑for‑word) translation, point out uncertain corruptions in the manuscript, or supply an authoritative modern translation for comparison (e.g., by R.S. Pine‑Coffin or Henry Chadwick).