At the moment I am plodding away through a tedious but necessary task.
On the web here, there is a page which purports to be a list of all the works of Ephraem Graecus, as they appear in the seven volume Phrantzolas translation / edition. It also links to a PDF with the ancient Greek text of most of them.
It’s fairly obvious that this is a useful item, which would be much more useful if it had the CPG number for each work, and the page numbers in the Assemani edition, and indeed the page numbers for the works in the Phrantzolas edition. So I have begun to prepare a version of it, in just such a form.
Boy it is hard work!
I’d naively assumed that Phrantzolas wouldn’t resequence the works from the order in which they appear in Assemani. This is largely, but not completely true.
I knew that he omitted “texts” which are duplicate, printing in each case the longest version. I had not realised quite how wholesale the omissions are. In fact, we really need a cross-reference table for each work, indicating which of the several versions in Assemani has been translated by Phrantzolas. But this does not seem to be in the edition. Indeed Phrantzolas states that an index volume will be published separately. Unfortunately I have not been able to locate any details of such a volume.
Clearly Ephraem Graecus scholarship needs to start with some basic bibliographical tasks, requiring no more than the skills of a research assistant. But this is a very necessary task, which is as yet undone.
So… I have been driven back to work from the original list. I find that in CPG volume 5 there is a list of authors and (Latin titles) in alphabetical order, which helps quite a lot. There is also a list of Greek initial words (initia), which also (but not always) helps.
Slowly, slowly I drive this forward. I am in volume 4 at the moment. I’ve not added the Phrantzolas page numbers as yet – I’ll do a second pass for these.
I’m editing in raw HTML, as this gives me some interesting capabilities for bulk find-and-replace. I’m not convinced, either, about the format.
Nor am I certain that the result would be best hosted here. I wonder if perhaps the Saint Ephraim site (http://saintephrem.wordpress.com/) might be a better place? Oh well. First create the thing.
Dear Roger, a solution may also be to integrate the datas directly in Pinakes, where it would be useful. Let us know if you are interested!
Certainly an interesting thought. I wonder what Pinakes has for Ephraim Graecus.
All the works appearing in the CPG, with their latin title, and many manuscriptsn sometimes references to Assemani http://pinakes.irht.cnrs.fr/notices/auteur/995/ (but not all: too many are under Opera, since they are not described in detail in the catalogues: http://pinakes.irht.cnrs.fr/notices/oeuvre/10259/).
Ah, I see: you could really use the Assemani references that I am collecting in here: http://pinakes.irht.cnrs.fr/notices/auteur/995/ . Yes, I’d be glad to contribute. I’m working on my stuff in a text file, so I could easily create an XML file from it, or a SQL file. Presumably keyed on CPG number?
My stuff looks like this, so I could easily transform it. Not got the Phrantzolas pages yet tho.
An SQL file will be perfect, with CPG as key. If possible, links should be treated separately, in order to be integrated as links. Many thanks!
In fact, SQL, CSV or XML would be perfect. Choose the easiest for you!
Sure. It will be a while tho.