Ephrem the Syrian is the most famous of the Syriac writers; but there is a mass of material in Greek attributed to him. Some of it is translations of the Syriac, but most is clearly not. It looks as if there was a fashion for writing in his style at one point.
Unfortunately this large splodge of unexplored material has never been critically edited. Instead it was collected by Assemani in the 18th century from manuscripts, and more or less printed as he found it. Some of the texts are clearly excerpts from others of the texts. Assemani gave a Latin translation.
Since then we’ve had Phrantzolas reprint the text in 1988-98 in 7 volumes, with a modern Greek translation. That was a step forward.
But now I read that a complete English translation is in progress! An English translation is indeed the obvious next step. Making it easier to dip into the texts will cause more young scholars to start doing so, and in turn to start creating scholarship about it. Little by little Ephrem Graecus is being opened up!
Via the St Ephrem: The Greek Corpus site:
Published Translations of Ephrem Graecus Coming Soon
That’s it. That’s the news. A translation of the Greek writings attributed to St Ephrem the Syrian is currently underway with St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. They are currently working on vol. 1 (of seven). Look for it probably in 2024.
The site owner told me:
A friend of mine here in the US is working on it. I had planned to do a volume of the most (historically) “important” texts, but he was inspired to do the whole collection, so I yielded to him. It will be very good to finally put out there
This is massively good news. Wonderful!