Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
Czech scholar Petr Kitzler has started his own site. He writes:
I have started my own site, as you advised. See https://sites.google.com/site/petrtert/. For now, this is mainly my bibliography, with as many resources on-line or full-texts as was possible. I will of course update the pages, but it depends on my spare time (which looks bad these days). I hope people will find it interesting.
At a conference a few years ago, I remember hearing an anecdote about how the original Loeb translation of the Apostolic Fathers was made. The translator was the great Kirsopp Lake.
According to the story, Lake made his translation by lying on a sofa in his rooms with a copy of the Greek text in his hand, and simply reading a translation to a secretary as he lay there.
Those were the days of real classical learning!
We all know the Twelve Caesars of Suetonius. I suppose most of us have read at least some of the Augustan History, similarly modelled, but largelya 4th century fake.
But I found myself thinking of the author of the next twelve lives after Suetonius, the lost writer Marius Maximus.
Maximus is referred to in the Augustan History, and also by Ammianus Marcellinus. He followed the tradition of Suetonius by retailing racy gossip as well as material from sources, good and bad. Apparently his work was favoured reading by senators, rather as modern politicians read Jeffrey Archer.
I wonder what the testimonia of Marius Maximus are. Who is the last author to display knowledge of his work? When did it perish, I wonder.
…is here, which I link to mainly as an excuse to display a rather amusing picture from it:
Anyone who has “debated” with atheists online — especially anyone whom the atheists found better informed than themselves — will understand.
A comment asked how much the various elements of the projects I am doing actually cost, aside from the hours and hours of time. I thought a post on this might be of interest.
My trip to Cambridge to look at Anastasius of Sinai was 120 miles and cost me around $45 in petrol, plus about $7 of copying.
Translating has no fixed cost; it is entirely about supply and demand. There are other considerations also, which I will come to.
Some translating can be got for nothing. Much of this is worth what it costs, but an academic will tend to do a good job, even if unpaid.
As a rule I offer 10c per word of the original language, for smaller amounts, and I find that I can usually get someone decent at this price. For larger amounts I tend to have Migne as a control; I offer $20 per column of Migne (about 400 words). These numbers apply to Latin, Greek and Christian Arabic.
I have found it quite impossible to get people to translate Syriac at less than 20c per word. While a lot of people claim to know it, in practice those able and willing are not available for less.
This leads me into the other important aspect — reliability. There are few things as infuriating as someone who agrees with you to do the work and just doesn’t, or does it to an inferior standard if at all. I always follow my gut; people who are going to be a pain tend to be a pain pretty early on. It doesn’t get better — if it isn’t any good initially, it will be worse later.
You do have to check what you’re being offered, of course. I always make the first chunk of stuff a sample; if it’s OK, I pay them; if it isn’t, I don’t and cancel the job. This is essential, unless you want people who wish they could translate offering you gibberish. The price bears no relationship to the quality of work done, by the way.
Checking means hiring someone to do some work which is really time-related. I tend to pay $20 an hour for odd bits of work, setting a maximum if I don’t know how long it will be. Again, this is probably too high, and I try to constrain the price in other ways.
Transcribing text is something I have just started to do. The web suggests a price of $10 per 1,000 words. This is probably too much also, but we’ll see how it goes.
Typesetting the book; I haven’t actually done any of this, but the quotes I have are between $300-$700.
Copying in libraries tends to be 15c a sheet.
Are there other costs? Probably, but these come to me off the top of my head.
Searching for people to do work: these days I post an ad in BYZANS-L for Greek stuff, HUGOYE for Syriac. For Christian Arabic I now have a little pool of people I know are reliable.
So … it can be an expensive business. But translating the Eusebius and the Origen is turning out to be around $3,300 each. Now that is not a small sum. But … it isn’t the end of the world, is it?
One bit of paranoia concerned the Syriac fragments of Eusebius, printed by Gerhard Beyer in 1926 in the German journal Oriens Christianus. I couldn’t find any information on when he died. In Europe, copyright extends until 70 years after the death of the author, you see. So I wrote to Hubert Kaufhold and Manfred Kropp, the current editors of Oriens Christianus, asking whether they knew when he died and if they claimed a copyright.
I had a very friendly email back from Dr Kropp yesterday, promising to look; and tonight Dr Kaufhold wrote as follows:
… Bei dem Autor des Oriens Christianus Dr. Gerhard Beyer handelte es sich um einen katholischen Priester, der 1931 gestorben ist (vgl. H. Kaufhold, Oriens Christianus. Gesamtregister für die Bände 1 (1901) bis 70 (1986), Wiesbaden 1989, S. 39, 146. Ein Urheberrecht besteht deshalb nicht mehr, so daß Sie seine Edition ohne weiteres verwenden können.
…Dr Gerhard Beyer was a Catholic priest, who died in 1931 (see H. Kaufhold, Oriens Christianus. Collected indexes for vols 1 (1901) to 70 (1986), Wiesbaden 1989, pp. 39, 146. No copyright exists any longer, so you can use his edition freely.
Full marks to the OC team to keep track of such things! Who would have guessed that an index with that sort of information in it existed?
I must remember to thank them in the book, and send them a copy of the electronic text when I have it.
Origen’s Homilies on Ezekiel are mostly extant in a Latin translation by Rufinus. For the book version, we’re going to need an electronic text. I’ve scanned a few Latin texts in my time using OCR, and the results have often been variable. Back in 2000, the quality of software was lamentable. Today it is better, but even Abby Finereader 10 doesn’t include recognition for Latin.
So I’ve decided to hire someone to do it manually, and we’ll see how it goes. Market rates seem to be about $10 per 1,000 words, which is liveable with.
I ought to apologise, by the way, for all the project-related posts at the moment. These are occupying every minute of my time, so I really am thinking about nothing else right now!
I thought I’d better sacrifice my Saturday and come up to Cambridge and actually look at the Corpus Christianorum edition of Anastasius of Sinai, before negotiations with Brepols to reprint extracts got much further.
It’s a rainy day, here. The university library is full of students, some with college scarfs, working away — for with the rain, what point in skiving off? It brought back memories of doing the same when I was college. I’m sat in the computer room, where I had to check which bits of Ambrose’s Commentary on Luke I need, before photocopying them from Riain’s translation.
The volume of Anastasius was to hand, and I started looking for questions 148 and 153. But… there were none. There was 103 questions and some more in an appendix. What there was not, tho, was any indication of how to map the “traditional” numeration from Mai and Migne to this edition.
Fortunately the introduction was in English. But … there’s a learning point here. Everyone who comes to my Eusebius volume will want to be able to locate the material referenced by other books against Migne or Mai or Beyer quickly and easily. The very, very first thing they need, at the front of the book, is an explanation of how I have arranged the book, what I have printed, and where they can find the bit they want.
Unfortunately the CCSG editor — who worked on the book for more than 30 years! — did not have a friend to tell him this. I wasn’t completely certain, but it looks as if he simply didn’t edit some of the material from the Migne edition of Anastasius. He doesn’t actually say so. Instead he edits what he believes to be original. That’s understandable; but it took me a frustrating half an hour thumbing through the book to come to that tentative conclusion. This we must avoid with our book.
On the positive side, it means I don’t need the permission of Brepols to use their text, since they didn’t include the material! And the only bit in question is the extracts from Jerome, differences totalling five words! To use those five words, I have to hand them control of the circulation of the book, and pay them money. Well… I think I can live without those five words. But I will consider it.
Not that I am slagging off Brepols here. I still don’t believe in the claim of copyright; it’s clearly a scam to claim copyright on an ancient author, by virtue of editorial tweaks to a few words here or there. Indeed if you did that with a 19th century author, you would be firmly shown the door by a court. But I think that Brepols, by their own lights, are dealing with me rather generously. It is simply that someone like me, with a Creative Commons destination in mind, is not the sort of thing a business usually deals with. Indeed the new world of the web that is appearing all around us must be very confusing and threatening to many a publisher.
I think that Brepols are genuinely trying to be flexible and to help, for an offline publisher. And … they have staff to pay, like everyone else, so it is understandable that they don’t want to give away money. In publishing it is the rights that give a “long tail” of income to a title.
I’ve decided to see if I can market the CDROM of the Fathers and Additional Fathers a little. It will be good practice for book selling. I’m going to have an experiment on Facebook. I’ve set up a couple of pages here to start with, and let’s see what happens! It ought to get a few more copies of the Fathers out into the world.