Category: miscellaneous news

£20 (i.e. $40) got me a copy of the uncommon second edition of Alice Zimmern’s translation of Porphyry’s Letter to Marcella.  It came as an early paperback, rather foxed (‘slight foxing’ in the optimistic words of the seller).  I started to scan the pages of this, using Abbyy Finereader 8.0 and an OpticBook 3600, and got very good results, without breaking the frail spine of the book. 

Unfortunately the copy I have has that mouldy smell that one finds in books that have been exposed to unclean conditions.  Since I don’t want a smell of dirt in my house, it will have to be returned, and I will have to get another.   But I wonder what this smell is?  At all events booksellers should certainly indicate if it is present.

The introduction by Alice Zimmern is general, and of no special interest, although I will include it when I scan it.  She doesn’t indicate any revisions to the translation, and the ‘revised edition’ is only mentioned on the title page.  I have yet to compare the two, but I wonder if perhaps the ‘revision’ is an invention of the publisher?   In 1920 the first edition was out of print.  At all events a revision would allow it to appear with a different publisher, where a straight reprint would fall foul of copyright.

The Phanes Press reprint got rid of the thee’s and thou’s which disfigure the copy before me.  As such it is much more readable.  But I will leave the text as I find it.

We need to be grateful to Google Books for making material available gratis. Today I learned again just how much a library can charge for a photopy. When I was still looking for a copy of Hart’s 1749 translation of Herodian, I contacted several libraries who had one (located using Copac) and asked. The British Library wanted around $200. Aberdeen University have just managed to come up with a similar and slightly higher price. It makes you look differently at each PDF on Google Books, doesn’t it?

I was searching for a copy of Hart’s 1749 translation of Herodian to buy, rather than pay $200+ for a photocopy, when I stumbled across a modern translation by Edward Echols, published in 1961.  Something made me look at the copyright, and lo! it is out of copyright and in the public domain in the USA.  I promptly purchased a copy online, and this should be a better choice to scan than Hart.  If I had access to JSTOR, I could even read the reviews and see what people thought of it.  The Loeb translation is in copyright, and anyway I dislike scanning material from Loebs, since I think the series should be encouraged.

Ipswich Library have confirmed that the only copy in the UK in COPAC of the second edition of Alice Zimmern’s translation of Porphyry to Marcella has got lost in the ILL process.  Fortunately it should be possible to purchase one. I will consider donating it to Glasgow University Library, in recognition that they would still have the book, had they not been willing to lend it to me; and I hardly want them to lose out from their generosity.  GUL have lent me a lot of books down the years, and even photocopied some for me at a very reasonable price.  They are probably the most public spirited library in Britain, and I feel indebted to them.

Alice Zimmern herself turns out to have been an early advocate of voting rights for women, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.  She graduated from Girton college, Cambridge. She died in 1939.  It is a pity that Phanes Press, when they reprinted her work, chose to remove all her own comments from it.

I’ve also started thinking about how to do the collaborate translation project of Eusebius’ Chronicle, book 1, and I’ve finished OCR’ing the Latin.  It consists of around 2,000 lines in the HTML file.  I shall divide the text into single-sentence sections, and each week we will work on perhaps 150 sections at a go, depending on whether they are trivial or not.  I think that I will hold these in a mySQL database, if I can get it to work.  One problem is how to enter the German translation, and whatever partial English translations exist, in parallel, without cutting and pasting 2,000 times.  The answer, I think, is to load a table with sentences, and then be able to move chunks of sections up and down, until they all match.  So I will need to write a little bit of software to allow me to do this, probably in PHP.

It’s the Easter Monday bank holiday here, and this somewhat self-indulgent series comes to an end. Tomorrow real life is put on hold, and I must go back to work.

I picked up the Sources Chrétiennes edition and translation of Cyril of Alexandria Against Julian the Apostate, although only books 1 and 2 were done.  The French translation is lively and easy to read, and this impelled me to translate some more of book 2.  In it Cyril makes some interesting statements about what Genesis does NOT contain, and for whom Moses was writing.  It’s an interesting work.  Sadly the translator Prof. Paul Burguière passed on in 2000, so we need expect no more.

The other thing that I did today was address the Google Books problem.  This is where out of copyright material is invisible to people in the United Kingdom, purely because Google bars access.  But the problem can be circumvented if you can anonymise your web connection.  Indeed the techniques are just the same as those for getting past web censorship.  However I have now raised the issue in a couple of fora; who, precisely, benefits from UK readers being unable to see stuff in Google Books?  Senior academics regularly dine with government ministers, so this is a problem that can be fixed.  I’ve had a bit of a go, anyway!

Well I woke up aching from working so hard yesterday, but I did get away from the screen for the morning.  This afternoon was spent on Ammianus.  It’s done, and it’s here:

http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/index.htm#Ammianus_Marcellinus

The text etc is all public domain everywhere in the world, so go ahead, take copies, use it as you see fit with my blessing. That’s what it’s for. I had to omit footnotes, as I said, and probably there are typos. If you see the latter, and feel like sending them to me, I will fix them, sometime.

This morning a copy of Porphyry’s Letter to Marcella arrived on the mat.  This was translated by Alice Zimmern and is out of copyright.  A look at COPAC tells me that she did a second, revised edition, which only Glasgow University Library holds.  I made an ILL for that back in February, but it hasn’t arrived and Ipswich County Library, in addition to charging me $10, seem to have lost the plot on ILLs.  All the reprint versions are from the first edition, including the copy I now have.  Another text to go online (now done!), and I’ll fix it if the second edition ever arrives here.

Tomorrow is Sunday. You can see from this blog just how much time I can spend in front of the screen when I’m not at work; my work involves sitting in front of a screen also. So Sunday is my “sanity day”: I don’t use, read or think about computers, patristics, antiquity, work, chores, or anything that I do in the rest of the week. I try to get outdoors, and walk down by the coast. It’s also Easter Sunday, the anniversary of the Resurrection and the beginning of hope for mankind. So expect no entry tomorrow. Here in the UK everything closes, thankfully, and the low-paid wage slaves working in supermarkets get, like the heroine in Browning’s Pippa Passes, their one day off a year. I wish you all a happy Easter, and many Easter eggs!

Books 24-31 of Ammianus Marcellinus went through the scanner by lunchtime, and in the afternoon I went through proofing the result.  As I have found before, reprints of the Bohn translations tended to get fainter over time, as the plates grew worn.  Towards the end this began to be a problem, although fortunately I was able to see what every word was, and I completed proofing of books 14-31 around 9pm.

The version has very limited footnotes, and many of these seem useful.  But with the very limited time available to me — I had hoped to complete the whole task in one day — something had to be omitted. 

I’ve now begun to format up the results for upload, and have completed books 14 and 15.  It seems as if it will probably take the rest of today to do this. 

The translation itself is fine, with little ps.Jacobean English.  It’s a very interesting text, actually, and I have enjoyed reading it.  Beginning part way through the reign of Constantius II, it runs down to the death of Valens at Adrianople.  The Penguin translation omits the digressions — yet these are interesting too, particularly the one on Egypt.

Another sunlit day of blue skies beckons (I’m writing these notices in the early morning). Time to go forth and enjoy Saturday morning before I get on with it!

This morning is Good Friday, the sun is shining and a beautiful day is in prospect.  It is the anniversary of when an ordinary middle-class man was done to death horribly by one part of the establishment, the other part (which could have saved him) being unwilling to use up political capital over a “trivial” matter.  I’m nobody; so are most people.  It could have been us.  That’s what human nature in a position of power looks like – indifference to what is right in the cause of what is convenient for the selfish. Historically the festival is now nearly 2000 years old, which is remarkable. When it was first celebrated, there was still an emperor on the throne in Rome.

After finishing at 9pm last night with the Syriac program (I was starting to make mistakes), I started thinking about the Roman History of Herodian.  This writer of the 3rd century AD is little known. A Loeb Classical Library translation from 30 years ago exists.  But so do two public domain versions.  The first is a 17th century one; the other much more modern from 1749, by a Mr. J. Hart.  Neither is online in any form and I have seen neither.  The first, indeed, might well be just a rendering from a French version.

I’d like to get the Hart text online.  The first question is where to find a copy.  Glasgow university had one, and are helpful people.  But it was fragile, and I could only have 20 pages (out of 400+).  Leeds ignored my email; when I repeated it, I was told courteously that they saw no need to make a copy, and had no obligation to the general public anyway, although I wonder if they say that in funding applications for taxpayers’ money.  Aberdeen also ignored my email (no doubt, as for Pilate, it wasn’t convenient).  The British Library have one, and will make a copy for $250, which is a lot of money — probably the price of the book itself, if one could find one for sale — and I will consider it. 

Another issue is that a book of that date will employ the long-S fairly enthusiastically, which is unrecognised by OCR.  A dozen corrections per page for 400 pages might be time-consuming.

The other history that should be online and isn’t is Ammianus Marcellinus.  The Loeb may be in the public domain, even; and there is a C.D.Yonge translation from Bohn’s Library that definitely is.  The latter is even on Google books, for US readers only, as Chris Weimer verified for me.  I have had a photocopy of it for years, almost 2 inches thick, sitting on a shelf.  Anyhow I checked that no-one had scanned it since I last looked, and then began to run it through the scanner.  I did 6 books, and OCR’d and proof-corrected 1 book, by midnight.  (At that point I retired to bed with Northanger Abbey!).  At this moment book 23 (9th of those extant) is going through the scanner.   It is high time that this work was online, and I will now do it.  The quality may not be great, there will be no footnotes; but if anyone wants to correct typos, they can; if not, then it doesn’t matter.  Either way it will be done.  I do wish that my scanner could take more than 25 pages at a time, tho!

After a morning outdoors, I’m working away on the Syriac program, and finding how slow software development is! 

But I’ve also been thinking a bit about translating Eusebius Chronicon book 1.  There are materials in Syriac; Jacob of Edessa continued Eusebius’ text, and fragments of that survive.  They’re published in the Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium (CSCO) series by Peeters of Leuven and so can be purchased over the internet.  Armenian texts often have some kind of Syriac connection.

The way that the translation needs to be done is to put online a large table in two columns.  The left hand column will contain the Latin text, with the German translation underneath, and underneath that any existing English translation (e.g. from Syncellus or the Loeb Manetho); the right-hand the translation, in short 1- or 2-sentence sections, initially blank.  Each section will have an edit button.  When clicked on this will bring up the section full-screen, with links to the Armenian, the printed version of Petermann, and whatever else is available.  This will just be a couple of PHP scripts, of course.  Last time this backed onto bunches of text files, but I might use mySQL to store the data this time.

I’d like us to be able to look at the Armenian text, at least. Of course when printed small it’s just squiggles, but, hey, let’s display it in 30 pt! I notice that in Coakley’s 5th edition of Robinson’s Syriac Grammar, the whole text is printed so small that I had to use a magnifying glass to pick out the supra-linear vowels (invented by Mar Jacob of Edessa, as above). But I see no need to make such a mistake.

I’d love to get on with Eusebius (see below) but I can now work on that in weekends. But for the last two days I have been working on my Syriac-English program, which has needed some uninterrupted time spent on it.  The idea is to allow you to paste or type a bunch of vocalised (or not) Syriac text into a window, hit a key and get some kind of English translation back.  Also you will be able to hover over a word in Syriac and get a transcription, and grammatical details. 

Coding for right-to-left text has various pitfalls, which I have been labouring over, but have solved and written up a summary online.  Likewise I wanted to use modern test-driven development with it (a decision that proved itself yesterday) and this also was less easy than it should have been. Again I have written a summary online.

I decided to use (by permission) George Kiraz’ database SEDRA.  This contains all the words in the New Testament, with morphologies and basic meanings.  This itself is quite difficult to fight with, and you do need the article that he published in Symposium Syriacum.

Yesterday I finally made some progress, and I was able to paste the first chapter of John into the program, hit the button, and find it recognise all but 3 words (and I think that missing spaces in the HTML Syriac text that I used were the case for these).  Now I need to output the right information for these words. 

There is only one fully vocalised Syriac text in Serto available online.  I found that the site is clearly about to disappear, so spent some time in mirroring it here.  The author directs enquirers to the texts at the Complete Aramaic Lexicon site, but this is very hard to use.

I wonder what I’ll do today.  That darned sun is shining again, and my hedge-trimmer is calling to me…