Some years ago a dedicated soul decided to digitise the complete English translation of Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job. It is a task that I shirked, I admit.
But he’s done it! It’s complete! And it’s here, on a very nice-looking website.
The translation was part of the Oxford Movement Library of the Fathers project. Anyone who has seen the original volumes will flinch at the amount of labour that must have been involved.
Well done, that man!
Even better news: Brian Kerns OCSO is doing a new translation of the Moralia in Job for Cistercian Publications! The first volume (containing Books 1–10) apparently has been given the designation Cistercian Studies Series 249. Since the most recent Cistercian Studies Series volume I know about is number 244, I’m hoping for quick publication.
In the mean-time, it seems that an affordable printing of the Oxford edition is available on Amazon.com, here: http://tinyurl.com/8mthylf
Given the sometimes overly “free” style of translations published by Cistercian Studies, I am grateful that the older and rather literal edition is available.
Be very careful which of the “reprint” editions you order. Some simply print the Google Books scan, but one volume of the Gregory that I bought had a text that had been run through an OCR program with no proofreading. The result was mostly garbage.
The days of reprinters who care about books is over.
@MHB: I’ve had some poor quality experiences, but none that bad. Any idea which “reprint” volumes you bought?
@George: Thank you for the link! Any idea what the quality of that particular reprint is like?
I bought Morals on the Book of Job (volume 3, part 1), published by General Books LLC in 2009. I will NEVER buy anything from that company ever again.
Roger, as you know very well, you can’t simply OCR a book printed in 1847 and hope it will come out all right without proofreading. If nothing else, you will have running heads, shoulder notes, side notes, page numbers, and signature letters smack in the middle of the text, not to mention all the letters the OCR software interpreted wrongly.
That’s useful – thank you. Nor will I, then.
It is very rare to get OCR output, even from the best original, that does not require very extensive intervention. It is, at least, not an experience that I have ever had. You were badly cheated.
@Roger: The books are a newly-typeset edition rather than OCR. No errors jump out at me. The headings are clean and well-positioned. Some archaisms (e.g. “kine”) have been replaced (“cows”). They do not include all of the footnotes of the original; the editors report that they preserve those with theological import rather than references to secondary historical works. Amazon doesn’t have a “search inside” feature but perhaps that’s because they’re only recently published. It will likely appear soon. The ISBNs are: 1478343850, 1478352086, and 147836565X.
@George: thank you! – that is interesting, isn’t it? Frankly it sounds great!
Actually it’s quite interesting to see how I feel about an edition composed in the way that I do my web pages! – i.e. ambivalent, because I always want the original. But there can be no doubt that these volumes will be much more generally useful, if they have fixed obvious archaisms. The footnotes in these editions were often over-done. So … well done, the editors!
Does the book say who produced it?
Wonder how they did the typesetting.
Looks like it’s these folks: http://www.facebook.com/exfont