We’re now at Question 6 ad Stephanum, but an interesting question has arisen. What do we do about scripture quotations?
Where these are verbatim, we ought to use some recognised version. But which one? Worse, I have heard rumours that some copyright holders demand money to allow their version to be used; the RSV was mentioned, rightly or wrongly.
Suggestions please…
I’m enjoying your notes about this project as it unfolds very much! About Biblical citations – when I was working on translating the Physiologus, I felt I had to translate the Biblical citations as well, using the same standards of translation I was applying to rest of the text. Especially if there was some key play on words (as there almost always was), I needed to do my OWN translation of the Biblical material in order to show how it fit into the flow of the Physiologus’s own writing. So I included a citation reference, but did my own translation. This was also important for the Physiologus because there are variant citations in there (especially for Vetus Latina attestations) which do not match exactly the Biblical text as it later came to be standardized; I don’t know if this is true for your text or not.
Thank you for your appreciation — I was worrying if I was being a bit egotistical in presuming the details to be of interest to others.
I am most interested to hear how you did this (and that you tackled so odd a text as the Physiologus — well done!). My translator wants to do the same, but has come out with some strange-sounding alternatives, which make me nervous.
Roger, what about the YLT (Young’s)? It’s literal, and it’s free (long out of copyright).
Chris