Category: Arabic Christian Literature

Making your own translation tools

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I am a profoundly lazy man, in some respects anyway.  I hate pointless labour.  And what can be more pointless than the way many of us translate?

Imagine getting a French text in front of you.  The process goes something like this:

You read the first sentence.  You type an English version into Word.  Then you look back to the book.  A few moments of searching along the line, and you find the second sentence.  You know most of the words, but not all, so you type in a couple of them in an electronic dictionary.  Then you look back again at the page, to get the whole sentence, and spend time again fumbling for it in the mass of text.  Then you write another sentence.  And so on.

Frankly all this switching to and fro is annoying and pointless.

What we need, surely, is to turn the French into an electronic form, split it into sentences, and put each sentence on a separate line.

We could go further.  Machine translators for French are quite good.  Let’s run the electronic text through one of those.  Then split the translation into sentences, and interleave them with the French.

Won’t that be much easier?  We no longer have to find a text in a page in a book; it’s immediately above the line.  We have the machine translator’s vocabulary; that will reduce the amount of looking up.  In short, it’s easier and quicker and less painful.

I’ve written a little utility that does the splitting into sentences and the interleaving.  I use it with a machine translator, and just paste the output back into my utility.

Of course it’s limited in what it does, but the output is a  nice word document with interleaved French and English.

It’s making working on Agapius much easier anyway!  If only there were some way to hover a mouse over a French word and get a full dictionary entry.  Are there any French dictionaries in XML form?

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Back to Agapius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Am I the only person who is terribly easily led?  Someone writes to me about a project that I had put to one side, and the next thing I know I’m dusting it off and working on it again.

I’ve started doing a little more on the translation of Agapius.  Specifically I’ve scanned in the remainder of the pages for part 2.2, which takes us to the end of the manuscript, some time in the Abbassid period.  I’ve also run Finereader 9.0 over them — and goodness, isn’t that a fine piece of OCR software!  Beautiful recognition quality.

I need to get back to translating 2.2, and turning more of it into English.  Perhaps I can do some of that in the evenings this week.

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Agapius translation – great minds think alike

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Arabic history of Agapius was published with a  very simple French translation in the Patrologia Orientalis.  Since there is no English translation of this interesting work, I’ve been working on making one from the French.  The PO version was made by a Russian, so is not complex French and machine translators can make quite a good attempt at it.

I heard today from another online chap, who has been doing the same!  He’s suggesting we look at collaboration, or at least avoiding doing the same job twice.  That would be sensible, I think.

I never imagined that there was any risk of someone else doing this.  I felt a bit shifty about it; translating a translation is a bit rubbish.  But after a century it is clear that no-one was going to make an English translation of any of the five important Arabic Christian histories.  Maybe my efforts might provoke one!

In a way, we’re looking at a positive spiral here.  An amateur does a rubbishy translation of part of it from French, which provokes another amateur to do a better one, which provokes someone who knows Arabic to improve the situation again, which leads a professional to do an academic version.  That’s what is happening with Eusebius Chronicle (more or less!), and everyone benefits as momentum takes hold.

Of course there is a negative spiral possible, as Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie found out almost a century ago.  He produced some bad translations of Proclus, often from the French.  No-one took any notice.  The only person to take any notice was a now-forgotten academic, who published a review slagging them off as worthless.  So Guthrie was discouraged, no-one else was motivated to do better, and to this day the works he attempted have never received a proper translation.

Let’s hope that everyone who sees efforts like mine will think “I can do better” — and do better; rather than spend time debunking them.  Per ardua ad astra.

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Greek gospel catenas 1: catenas on Matthew

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There are four types of catena on Matthew.

Type A:  there are four versions of this.

  1. This contains mainly extracts from Chrysostom’s sermons.  Other authors are Isidore of Pelusium, Cyril of Alexandria; the monk Theodore.

  2. This is an expanded version of A.1.  In addition to the material in #1, it contains fragments of Photius, Basil the Great, Athanasius, Origen, Maximus the Confessor, and Gregory Nazianzen.

  3. This is an abridged version of A.1.  It contains mainly chunks of Chrysostom, but not identified as such.  This version was compiled in the time Leo VI ‘the wise’ (886-911).  Some late manuscripts identify Leo Patricius as the compiler.

  4. The most extensive version is also based on A.1.  Additional authors quoted include Severus, Theodore of Heraclea, and Theodore of Mopsuestia.

Type B: there are six versions of this, extant in multiple manuscripts.  This catena is attributed to Peter of Laodicea, but probably falsely.

Type C: this catena was compiled by Nicetas, Metropolitan of Heraclea in Thrace.  He was the last great catenist.  It was composed before 1080 AD.  The catena contains numerous extracts, mainly from Chrysostom.  The author attribution against each extract is unusually reliable.

Type D: this catena was composed in the 11th century, and contains mainly extracts from Chrysostom.  The catena can be found in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, graecus 194.

Unclassified: the following manuscripts also contain a catena on Matthew, which does not fit neatly into the above catefories:

  • Athos, Lavra B. 113.  This is an 11th century manuscript, and classified as type E by Geerard.

  • Vatican graecus 349.  11th century.

  • Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Suppl. gr. 1225.  11th century.
  • Rome, Biblioteca dei Lincei, A. 300.  12-13th century.

Macarius Chrysocephalus, Metropolitan of Philadelphia, also composed a catena on Matthew.  This made use of additional material, and not merely of earlier catenas.

A Coptic Catena is also known as the Robert Curzon catena, from its discoverer, was published by Paul de Lagarde.  It contains a catena on all four gospels.  This was translated from a now unknown Greek catena, which was more of a dogmatic anthology than an exegetical catena.  An Arabic Catena was made from it in a monophysite monastery in Egypt early in the 13th century.  The portion on Matthew was published with a Italian Spanish translation by F. J. Caubet Iturbe, La Cadena arabe del Evangelio suo Mateo, Vatican 1969-70.  Neither version has any relationship with any of the known Greek catenas.

Editions: J. Reuss, Berlin 1957 published material on Matthew, although this only scratches the surface.

Studies: R. Devreese, Dictionnaire de la Bible, Supplement 1 (Paris, 1928), pp. 1164-1175, on the Matthew catenas.  M. Geerard, Clavis Patrum Graecorum 4, pp. 228-235.  Karo and Lietzman, (as in intro), pp.119-131.

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Graf’s Geschichte not to be available in English

Posted on by Roger Pearse

One of the great problems with Arabic Christian literature is the lack of any guide to it in English.  The standard text is Graf’s Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur, published 50 years ago.

I worked out what a commercial translation of a volume would cost, and enquired through a friend whether the Vatican would permit me to translate it.  Today I’ve heard back that they will not.  The pretext is that they are updating it; but no details were given.

At this time, I was unenthusiastic about commencing such an expensive project.  But it is very disappointing all the same.  I have no confidence that any ‘update’ will be forthcoming any time soon, if at all.  The need for an English guide, however, will remain.

I do hate a dog-in-the-manger.  It would have cost them nothing to agree.

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Timothy I, Dialogue with the Caliph al-Mahdi

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In 781 AD the East Syriac Catholicos, Timothy I, was invited by the Abbassid Caliph al-Mahdi to answer a series of questions about Christianity over two days.  The discussion took place at Baghdad, while the Caliph’s son, Harun al-Raschid, was conducting a campaign against the Byzantines. 

The questions and his replies are extant in Syriac.  I’ve placed the English translation by Alphonse Mingana online here:

http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/timothy_i_apology_01_text.htm

Introduction here:

http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/timothy_i_apology_00_intro.htm

Timothy I was an interesting man, heavily involved in the Nestorian evangelism which ultimately reached China.  He also was involved in biblical textual criticism, and his letters record the discovery of some old manuscripts of the Psalms in the region of the Dead Sea; a possible precursor of the modern Dead Sea Scrolls discovery.

The text above is public domain: please copy freely.  It now forms part of my collection of public domain patristic texts available here:

http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/

For those who would like to support the work of the site, you can buy a CDROM of the translations from here:

http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/all_the_fathers_on_cd.htm

All the best,

Roger Pearse

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Brepols Patrologia Orientalis reprints

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m still working on Agapius, but wasn’t able to find a second-hand copy of part 2.2.  Somewhat nervously, I ordered a copy from the Brepols website.  I was nervous because reprints can be of very poor quality, as we all know.

Fortunately all was well.  The reprint arrived promptly, and the Arabic and the French are crisp and clear; not bad for a text 100 years old!  One of my rare family commitments prevented me doing anything with it over the weekend, but I hope to start scanning from it this weekend.

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Al-Makin II

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Satan’s Servants — the British Library — have sent me the microfilm of Ms. Or. 7564 on CD that I ordered, and indeed fairly quickly (which sort of suggests that they had it on disk already, and all they had to do was take my money).

The images are about what you’d expect.  How usable they are I don’t yet know.  Now I need an Arabist with time on their hands!

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Al-Makin in Wikipedia

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve been gathering information on Al-Makin, and updating the Wikipedia article, for lack of anywhere better to stuff the information.  A scholar has written to me about Al-Makin, who looks as if he would like to do a critical edition.  But with 80 mss, it’s fairly intimidating!

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Elmacin (Al-Makin) 1

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m not sure where this will take me, but I’ve taken a first step to doing some work on the World Chronicle (al-Majmu` al-Mubarak) of George Elmacin (Jirgis Al-Makin, Ibn Amid); I’ve ordered a copy of the text. 

In fact I’ve ordered a reproduction from the British Library of their manuscript, Ms. Or. 7564 (218 folios).  The reproduction is a digital scan of a monochrome microfilm (don’t laugh); and unusually for the BL, is at a reasonable price of around £60 ($120).  What the quality is like I don’t yet know.  They want a month to produce it, which I can live with.

The work itself is in two halves; the first in 116 biographies of major figures from the Creation down to the 11th year of Heraclius; the second is the “Historia Saracenica” edited with a Latin translation by Erpenius back in the 17th century.  I don’t know if I can get hold of a copy of the latter, or whether I need to yet.  A Latin translation of the end of the first part and all of the second exists in manuscript, unpublished, in the Bodleian, but their current policies on reproductions mean that this is inaccessible to me.

Now I’d like to pay someone to make a transcription and translation of the lot.  At the moment I have no idea what that would cost, except that any text that comes on 436 pages won’t be cheap.  I also have to consider the credit crunch, and whether someone like myself who works as a freelance can afford to fund an expensive long-running project when I don’t have work guaranteed beyond Christmas.

So I’m not sure what will happen here.  But let’s travel hopefully, cautiously and see. 

I think the first desideratum is to get a list of the 116 figures for whom Elmacin gives a  biography.  That shouldn’t cost too much, surely.  One problem may be that these names will be rubricated in the manuscript, i.e. done in red ink, which won’t be visible on a monochrome microfilm (we may fairly curse those who in the age of the digital camera force us to work with this obsolete technology!).  It might be possible to get images on DVD of the two Beirut mss from the HMML site for a relatively small sum, and these might fill the gap.

The next item, I think, would be a translation of the life of Christ.  This is the bit that Shlomo Pines used for his text of the peculiar Testimonium Flavianum that he attributed to “Agapius”, so should be interesting, to get a feel for whether that biography really drew on Agapius.

That should take us up beyond Christmas, and give me a better idea about the text, the costs, and the economic situation.  In 2002-3 most freelancers like myself were out of work for a year.  I devoutly hope the same doesn’t happen this time.

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