D. M. Spitzer, adjunct lecturer in arts and humanities at Penn State Mont Alto, published two books during the 2025-26 academic year exploring early Greek philosophy, translation and poetics.
MONT ALTO, Pa. — Through translation, poetry and philosophical inquiry, D. M. Spitzer, adjunct lecturer in arts and humanities at Penn State Mont Alto, explores new ways of interpreting some of the earliest texts in Greek thought.
During the 2025-26 academic year, Spitzer published two books examining ancient philosophy through language, imagination, relation and interpretation — themes that have shaped nearly three decades of his creative and scholarly work.
In "Parmenides & Translation: Figures of Motion, Figures of Being," published by Peter Lang Verlag in 2025, Spitzer revisited the ancient Greek philosophic poem known as the "Poem of Parmenides." Blending scholarship, philosophical inquiry and poetry, Spitzer said, the book explores how translation itself becomes a way of understanding meaning, motion and being.
In his latest book, "Breaking Light: Toward a Poetics of Opacity in Early Greek Thinking," published by SUNY Press this year, examines the earliest Greek philosophers through the concept of “opacity,” drawing on the work of Martinican thinker Édouard Glissant. Rather than viewing philosophy as a search for clarity and singular truth, Spitzer said his work explores the richness found in complexity, relation and multiple possibilities.
“Both books ask readers to slow down and think differently about language and meaning,” Spitzer said. “Ancient philosophy still has the power to reshape how we understand ourselves and our relationships with others.”
At Penn State Mont Alto, Spitzer teaches courses in arts and humanities while continuing a long-standing body of research centered on philosophy and translation. He has also edited three scholarly collections, including "Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy in Honor of Professor Anthony Preus," published by Routledge in 2023.
Currently, Spitzer is completing another book focused on migration, trauma and early Greek philosophy.
For Spitzer, philosophy is not something confined to ancient texts or classrooms.
“It’s about remaining open,” he said. “Open to interpretation, to movement, to relation and to the many ways people make meaning in the world.”
Q: What first drew you to these topics and areas of philosophy?
Spitzer: "Parmenides & Translation: Figures of Motion, Figures of Being" unfurls from my long fascination with — wonder at — the entanglements of poetry and philosophy among the ancient Greeks. This rose in me as an undergraduate and gathered momentum when I returned to college to study ancient Greek and classics after some years teaching high school.
A similar sense of wonder, but more specifically about the multiple meanings and resonances of water in experience and in texts from many periods and traditions, first stirred in me around 1999 and really is the motivating energy of "Breaking Light: Toward a Poetics of Opacity in Early Greek Thinking." At that time, my wife and I were expecting our first child and were full of excitement, energy and the thrill of possibilities.
Q: Why do these works matter to you personally?
Spitzer: In both of these books, I let flow and converge the major streams of my creative and intellectual life that have been gathering for almost thirty years: philosophy, literary studies, classics (ancient Greek especially), poetry and translation. For most of that time, I have been a spouse and parent, a caregiver in various ways and situations. My sense is that the relationships with many people for whom I have been a caregiver — my children, my deceased brother and mother, among others — have developed a language full of echoes, some of which echo in my writing. Also, I am glad to be bringing this work to publication at a time when two of my children are still students. Alongside being the primary caregiver for our family with all the household work that entails, I continue to develop research projects that inspire me. As witnesses to this combination of activities, I hope my children glimpse the importance of embracing a many-sided way of living.
Q: What do you hope readers or students take away from your books?
Spitzer: Most of all, I hope that my work inspires fresh, imaginative approaches to texts of philosophy, and especially those of ancient philosophy. As I experience it, philosophy is oriented by imagination in an expansive sense, and I hope these books work as invitations to imagine variously and diversely ways of being and thinking together.
Q: What excites you most about releasing these books at this point in your career?
Spitzer: With these in print, I am excited to be turning my attention to two other book-length projects: one I have just completed that interprets early Greek philosophers as literatures of migration and trauma, and another that focuses on the element called aither — what Aristotle called the fifth element — throughout early Greek thinking.
Parmenides & Translation: Figures of Motion, Figures of Being (Peter Lang Verlag, 2025) explores the intersections of philosophy, literature and translation through a new interpretation and translation of the ancient Greek Poem of Parmenides. The book has been described as “insightful, disconcerting, unexpected and urgent” by Alice Leal, associate professor in the Department of Translating and Interpreting Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Breaking Light: Toward a Poetics of Opacity in Early Greek Thinking was released by SUNY Press in May 2026. The cover artwork for Breaking Light is based on a digital collage created by his wife, Sara Shiva Spitzer, blending philosophy, art and collaboration into the finished work.
