None of the histories of Arabic Christian literature – Agapius, Eutychius, Yahya ibn Said al-Antaki, Al-Makin, Bar Hebraeus – exist in English translation. This site has made some modest efforts to remedy this, by turning the French translation of Agapius and the Italian translation of Eutychius into English, and posting them online. Judging from queries received, the effort has been worthwhile, and has drawn attention to both. It was difficult to obtain a copy of the Italian translation, but eventually I located and purchased one over the web from the Franciscan bookshop in Jerusalem, where it had plainly sat and gathered dust for many years. The translator was a certain Bartolomeo Pirone, of whom I knew nothing.
Indeed how many of us are that aware of material in Italian? Even though Google Translate handles Italian very well these days, few of us have any idea what is out there. Yet there are invaluable translations of otherwise inaccessible patristic material.
A few days ago I became aware of a series of translations into Italian of Arabic Christian literature, the PCAC series. This includes 30-odd texts from the literature of the Christians in the Near East, such as Theodore Abu Qurrah. The region was occupied by Islam in the 7th century, and they were obliged to write in Arabic from the 9th century onwards, as the cultural pressure became irresistible. But it is, at that period, a branch of Byzantine literature, and full of interest.
Much to my surprise, I discovered that the series was edited by none other than the same Dr Bartolomeo Pirone. Now retired but still active, he was a full professor at the University of Naples L’Orientale, and lectured in Cairo and Beirut. Judging from a google search, he has dedicated a portion of his life to making this literature known, in the most obvious way possible; by translating it into the vernacular, and gathering other scholars to do likewise. Indeed I have at this very instant just discovered that he also made a translation of Agapius into Italian![1] But this does not exhaust his work, which also includes Muslim literature, and the interaction between Christianity and Islam.
Much of his work was published by the Franciscan Province of the Holy Land, known as the “Custody of the Holy Land“. This in turn explains why a copy of his standalone translation of Eutychius was available in their bookshop in Jerusalem. There is an article from 2018 at the Franciscan website here, celebrating his 40 years of research.
I would imagine that very few people in the English-speaking world have ever heard of Dr Pirone and his immensely valuable work on an area of literature known to very few. But if you are at all interested in Arabic Christian literature, and especially if you – like myself – do not know any Arabic, then you need to know about his work.
- [1]Agapio di Gerapoli, Storia universale, Terra Sancta (2013), ISBN 9788862401647.↩