Phil Snider’s digest of patristic posts in the last month is now online here. Many thanks, Phil, for alerting us all to what’s going on.
Month: June 2009
More progress on translating Origen’s Homilies on Ezekiel
Still thinking of Lebanon
I’d like to go to Baalbek, and see the temple of the sun. Indeed I’d like to visit Syria. But these days I tend to insist on 5* hotels!
Some weeks ago I saw Voyages Jules Verne’s Restoration Story tour. Seven days, including three in Beirut, including a trip to Palmyra and Baalbek. It sounds wonderful.
But of course the political situation is a factor. I have no desire to get involved in Near-East politics! The Lebanese election this week returned a vaguely sensible government; but I think I will wait a little and see whether it calms things down before booking.
I’m in the process of dumping my existing credit card provider; when the new one comes through, I’ll look at this again.
Postscript: or maybe not. Their September departure won’t accept any single travellers. Oh well.
Israelis visiting Petra
This article cheered me up today. It relates how Jordan and Israel are working together to facilitate tourism to Petra. Israeli tour guides take parties to the border, and hand them over to Jordanian guides who take them to Petra for the day.
It’s pleasant to see animosity giving way to a chance to make money together. And the Jordanians are quite right! All these Israelis have money, and are willing to hand it over to the Jordanians in exchange for tickets to Petra, maps, souvenirs, cans of Pepsi, bus-travel, guide services, hotels… the list goes on and on. A lot of Jordanians will get rich. Most Jordanians will become better off.
Tourism is such a big business that only really, really stupid countries don’t get in on it. Arnold Swarzengger appears on UK television, promoting tourism to California, because it’s serious money. Even the most hideous despot — and Jordan is not run by one! — recognises that coaches full of foreign tourists bearing dollars is A Good Thing, and a very profitable form of farming. Egypt runs Luxor these days pretty much as a tourist farm; and quite rightly too.
Someone in Jordan has had a very clever idea. Good for them.
(Thanks to Paleojudaica for the tip).
Islamic Manuscripts conference, Cambridge
This via BYZANS-L:
…registration is now open for The Fifth Islamic Manuscript Conference, Cambridge 24-26 July 2009.
http://www.islamicmanuscript.org/Conferences.html
The Islamic Manuscript Association is pleased to announce that the Fifth Islamic Manuscript Conference will be held at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge, UK from 24-26 July 2009. It will be hosted by the Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation and the Centre of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge. We invite you to register online at http://www.islamicmanuscript.org/conferences/ConferenceRegistrationForm1.html<http://exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.islamicmanuscript.org/conferences/ConferenceRegistrationForm1.html>
In 2009, the Conference will specifically address the issue of access to manuscripts. Improving access to manuscripts through digitisation and electronic ordering and delivery systems whilst ensuring their proper long-term preservation is fundamental to the successful future study of the Islamic heritage. Presently, technologies are available that have the potential to transform the way manuscripts are studied; however, the access these technologies can allow is counterbalanced by collection holders’ concerns regarding their legal rights and the financial sustainability of their organisations. During the Fifth Islamic Manuscript Conference these vital issues will be discussed by our invited speakers and selected paper presenters.
As in previous years, the Conference will be organised around the Association’s four main interest groups: cataloguing, conservation, digitisation, and publishing and research. The first day will also feature two special panels, a ‘Collections’ panel introducing less well-known collections from Africa, the Balkans, and Turkey, and a panel devoted to the conference theme of Access featuring invited experts who will discuss how such issues as security in libraries and online, financial considerations, and the understanding of international copyright law inform users’ experience of accessing materials for research.
Posters advertising the conference can be found at
http://www.islamicmanuscript.org/conferences/Posters.html The full schedule will also be available online shortly. We look forward to welcoming you to Cambridge in July.
A bit depressing, this one. They’ve grasped that digitisation is necessary, but are still seeing the images mainly as a revenue stream! I’ve written to the conference contact, expressing my concern. They ought to be trying to get the things on the web, freely accessible to all. They ought to be encouraging people to look at them, to read them, to comment on them and translate them. Instead they’re trying to find ways to keep them off the web, out of circulation (vain hope) and charge while doing so. Eating the seed corn of Islamic studies, in other words.
UK: police threaten preacher with arrest for saying homosexuality is a sin (even though he didn’t mention it)
This, with video, from the Cranmer politics blog:
From The Christian Institute, it transpires that police officers told an open-air preacher in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, that it is a criminal offence to identify homosexuality as a sin. They said this to Andy Robertson, even though he had not mentioned anything to do with homosexuality in his preaching.
Only in oppressive societies do the police threaten Christian preachers with arrest for preaching.
Origen on Ezekiel – thinking about bible versions
Four chapters of the immense sixteen-chapter first sermon on Ezekiel by Origen have now been translated, with copious footnotes; and I have the first draft here. The translator has also discovered that Migne prints fragments of the original Greek preserved in the catenas, and is using these as a control. It’s going to be very good.
One issue with any patristic work is whether to use an existing English bible translation for the biblical quotations, in order to avoid unnecessary unfamiliarity. At the moment we’re using the RSV, except where Origen departs from the normal text. We’re also trying to preserve a balance between undue literalness in translation and undue freedom.
But it occurs to me that non-academic readers might like a freer rendition, which is slightly less faithful to the word-by-word approach, and somewhat easier to read and understand. If so, one might use a different bible version for the quotes.
Which one would one use? Perhaps if a version of the Homilies was made, directed at a popular Catholic audience, we’d use… well, whatever version most Catholic use. I don’t know what that is.
On the other hand any book aimed at US Christians in general would have to use the NIV, I would have thought. I suppose one would need to get permission from someone to do so.
Is there any real reason not to target all three audiences; an academic version, a Catholic popular version, and a Christian popular version?
Pricing John the Lydian, De Mensibus
I got hold of the 1898 text of John the Lydian and did some calculations. There seem to be about 7 words per line, about 26 lines per page, and 177 pages of text. That comes out at 32,214 words, which is probably a fair-ish estimate of how long the text is.
If I were to pay someone 10 cents a word to translate it, that would be $3,222. I don’t have any such sum to spare, so I won’t do so. But it’s interesting. To a corporation such sums are almost petty cash.
Ah, if I were a rich man…!
Origen on Ezekiel update
I’ve just had an email from the translator that a rough draft of all of homily 1 has been completed. This is a long homily, so is excellent news. I’ve not seen it yet, tho.
I have seen the draft of the first two chapters, and have commented on it. It’s an excellent translation, fairly literal but very readable.
One interesting issue that has arisen is where Jerome uses the Latin word tormentis to represent whatever Origen’s now lost Greek word was. Context is that God inflicts tormentis on sinners to drive them back to right living, and that fathers do the same to their sons. But all the dictionaries I can see render that as “tortures”! Origen then goes on to day that this rebuts the argument of the heretics, that God is cruel.
Do we render this as “torments” or “tortures”? It makes it read quite oddly, to do so. Yet… if that is what Origen wrote…
Cambridge University Library — no, the incunables are NOT going online
We all know what we want — we want library holdings on the web, where we can all see them. So I was rather delighted to see a news article yesterday that Cambridge University Library were going to put their collection of pre-1500 printed books on the web.
This would be quite a first — the obscurantism of UK libraries has to be experienced to be believed. The Andrew Mellon Foundation, who have done so much for the world in funding online initiatives, have granted them 300,000 GBP to do the job; not a huge sum, but probably enough. The BBC article here gives the impression that the incunables will go online.
But then a revealing aside:
Over the next five years the University library will produce detailed records for each item.
This made me look twice at the glowing claims, and look further. There’s no information on the library website at all, which is not good news. History Today magazine has an article here. This tells the real story:
Cambridge University announced, today, the beginning of a new project to catalogue, for the first time, the University Library’s celebrated collection of incunabula, pre-1501 printed books. The term incunabula literally means swaddling-clothes, or cradle, in Latin and was adopted to describe a book printed at an early date, in the first infancy of printing.
Very few records of the Library’s 4,650 treasures are currently in its online catalogue. Records will begin to be catalogued this autumn and, over the next five years, the University Library will produce detailed records for each item, which will be accessible through its Newton Universal Catalogue. …
Although the project does not involve a complete page-by-page digitisation of the Library’s incunabula, the Gutenberg Bible has been fully digitalised …
As if anyone has any use for yet another Gutenberg online.
So, the real intention is to have one or two staff members sit there for five years writing little card indexes (or whatever). Digitisation? Am I too cynical, to suppose that they’ll merely do a handful of books, as a sort of fig-leaf for what they really wanted to do?
Not that cataloguing is bad; but what we need, desperately need, is ACCESS TO THE BOOKS!!! Not more catalogues. Compiling a catalogue was the excuse used in the 19th century by Vatican libraries for denying scholars access to the library, and refusing them sight of what catalogue existed. I don’t know if that ever-so-complete catalogue ever appeared, indeed. But the obstruction of access was real enough.