Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
A commenter has discovered two manuscripts of the Old Slavonic Methodius online! The manuscripts used by Michael Chub, when he edited some of the works, are apparently accessible:
Some good news. I found the scans of two Old Slavic manuscripts used by Archbishop Mikhail.
See http://www.stsl.ru/manuscripts/index.php?col=5&gotomanuscript=040, the first two manuscripts (40 and 41) from the list.
Sadly one can’t download the things as PDF’s — they’d be much easier to look at in that form!
Some time back I discovered that a Russian translation existed of the works of Methodius of Olympus (d.311 AD). This is significant, since most of the works of Methodius known today have survived only in Old Slavic, or Old Russian.
The translation was made by Evgraf Loviagin, and the 2nd edition appeared in St. Petersburg in 1905. A copy exists in the University of Chicago library, and they agreed to digitise this if I sent them $20. A colleague with a US bank account kindly wrote me a cheque for that amount, and off it went.
This evening I can announce a little Christmas present for us all, courtesy of the University of Chicago: Loviagin is now online. They haven’t managed to upload the PDF to their own site yet — I’ll post the URL once I know it. It is undoubtedly public domain, since Loviagin died in 1909. So I have uploaded it to Archive.org, where you can access it here.
Not quite sure what it contains. Here’s the table of contents (from the back, of course):
Regular readers will remember that I commissioned an English translation of the German version by Bonwetsch of Methodius’ De Lepra (On leprosy). I did so, because the work is preserved in an Old Slavonic text, which has never been published, plus Greek fragments. The GCS series published a German translation by Bonwetsch of the Old Slavonic, interspersed with the surviving Greek remains (for which no translation was provided).
Unfortunately the translator had the greatest difficulty with ecclesiastical language, and I found myself investing more and more time in making what he produced make sense. This seemed to demoralise him, such that he stopped worrying about whether his output actually made sense in English. The final straw was when he delivered a long chunk, wherein many of the sentences weren’t even grammatical. At that point I terminated the contract, foreseeing that I would have to invest just as much time correcting this as I would if I had decided to do the whole thing myself. I still had to pay rather more than I really felt the work was worth, particularly as he had not troubled to respond to my queries on one set of pages at all.
What was done, to an adequate standard, was the first 6 pages of Bonwetsch, minus a long Greek chunk in the middle of the last two. This is now online here. As ever, I make this public domain; do whatever you wish with it, personal, educational or commercial.
Not sure what to do next. I’d still like this work translated, but I feel a bit bruised at the moment!
Sometimes it just doesn’t work. This morning I started looking through the translation of the German version of Methodius, De lepra, as given by Bonwetsch from the Old Slavonic. The translation into English — for which I am paying commercially — just didn’t work. The translator did not have the feel for ecclesiastical works, and so the result was unreadable. Worse, it was ungrammatical English at points. It made my head hurt, just looking at it and trying to work out what, if anything, it meant.
I’ve accepted the inevitable and messaged the translator to cancel the project. I shall have to pay him for what he has done, useless tho it is. It’s money down the drain, essentially.
Oh well. I tried.
The first few pages were not too bad, after I commented and suggested etc. I’ll post these here when I have handed over the money.
A reader kindly purchased a CD of my collection of the Fathers in English (available here). Since this collections is something that I work on continuously, I don’t keep a stock. So the order meant that I had to produce one.
I spent most of the morning trying to do so, and having baffling difficulties. This was my own fault entirely. What I did was to use Windows 7’s built-in facility to burn CDROM’s. When you pop a blank CDR disk into your drive, Windows pops up a menu asking if you want to burn data to CD. I tried doing this, and it failed with “not enough space”. Plainly the facility wasn’t familiar with the 700Mb CD-R format. But …
What I did not realise was that Windows does not clean up after itself. It leaves the files to be burned sitting in a temporary directory, and it leaves some kind of lock on the drive.
I learned this the hard way. I realised that Windows wouldn’t serve my purpose, so I fired up the software I usually use to do this. And the burn failed, mysteriously, wasting a blank disk. And the next one did the same. And then I rebooted, and, on reboot, got a message about files waiting to be burned to disk. I cleaned these out, tried again, and … failed again.
In the end I got a fresh blank disk, and a small Word file, and did a burn using Windows 7 of that. It worked perfectly, ran to end, and … reset whatever lock was messing up the other software.
That cost me a morning of my life. The moral is not to use Windows to burn data CD’s.
After lunch, I came back and worked some more on proofing Ibn Abi Usaibia. I reached page 750. Only 200 pages remain. I subdivided the remaining files into 40-page “projects”, as this gives a reasonable sense of achievement on a regular basis. Anyone who sets out with a single project and 950 pages to proof is likely to give up, out of sheer exhaustion! But break it up into smaller chunks, and the inner man is much happier. Know thyself, as the man said.
I’m still reading Grant’s Greek and Roman authors. It is a book that would be far better in chronological order. But I’m still getting value out of reading it, cover to cover. I realise from this how many classical Greek dramatic authors there are. I learn how little I know about this literature! But candidly, I acquired a set of the Loeb editions of the plays of the Latin dramatist Plautus, and I really couldn’t get into them at all. Eventually I disposed of them. I don’t have a single volume of ancient plays (or any other, come to that) on my shelves. I just don’t care for drama, I think.
Last night I also read through Hinnells paper on Cautes and Cautopates. It was very dry, consisting of solid statistical information. What I did NOT see in it, however, was any reference whatsoever to the two attendants of Mithras carrying shepherd’s crooks. This particular legend bubbles under on the web. Vermaseren claims (in Mithras: the secret god) that some relief shows this; but I am very doubtful. The image he gives looks dubious to me, and there is no indication of provenance. It is entirely possible for authors to read into reliefs the things that they expect to see! The Cumontian authors were terrible in just this respect. But I hope to acquire some PDF’s of Vermaseren’s real scholarly opus, the CIMRM, and so perhaps I can see precisely what there is to support his claims. I suspect it is a phantom.
A bunch of pages translated from the German of Methodius, “De Lepra”, has arrived. This is a relief, because I had begun to wonder if that project was dead. I’ve had no chance to look at these yet. The translator also sent me a sample of a translation of the first chunk of embedded Greek. I’ve passed it over to a trusted friend to check it over. I don’t know whether the Greek is very good, tho. My suspicions are roused because it doesn’t make that much sense in English. The translator subcontracted that bit, and I have no idea whether the person responsible is up to the job. We will see, in due course.
I’ve been translating from Russian the preface to a group of works by Methodius, as I mentioned here. It’s no work of scholarship, but the end product, from some Google Translate and the kind help of Maureen in the comments, is now online here:
http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/methodius_preface_chub.htm
It’s public domain as usual: do whatever you wish with it.
Someone has just emailed me to ask where they can find the Eight Homilies against the Jews by John Chrysostom. For years these have lived at a Fordham University page, but today I find them gone. The Archive.org archiver gives June 2011 as the last version. It’s probably just a glitch; but if not, I shall have to consider including them in my own collection.
UPDATE: It seems to be a great day for stuff to vanish from the web. The Cyprian Project lists of PG and PL volumes also seem to have gone.
This evening I sat down with the text of Michael Chub’s preface to his edition of a selection of the works of Methodius.[1]. I took the output from Google Translate, and went through it, smoothing and amending.
I got a very long way! It’s about 3,400 words, and nearly all of it fell into English quite neatly. But not all. If you know Russian, some thoughts in the comments on the following would be useful.
My first stop was:
The literary activity of St. Methodius, as can be seen, coincides with the end of the donikeyskogo period of development of theological thought, and, to some extent, can be regarded as a peculiar result of this development.
The period in question is that before the Edict of Milan in 313; but as I wrote this, it came to me that this meant “ante-Nicene”.
So far so good; but bluff and a machine translator will only take you so far. Now it gets hard.
Молитва св. Мефодия, известная только в славянском тексте, вне всякого сомнения, ^ принадлежит к числу наиболее ранних христианских молитв. Употребленные в ней формулировки и выражения чрезвычайно характерны для суждения о догматическом словоупотреблении доникейской эпохи. Заслуживает особого внимания то место молитвы, где говорится о победе над смертью, совершенной страданиями и умерщвлением Бесстрастного и Бессмертного. Здесь встречаются и скрещиваются слоза и мысли, знакомые уже древнейшей христианской Церкви (сравн. Игнатий Богоносец, „Послание к Поликарпу”, 3, 2; Григорий Неокесарийский, „Послание к Феопомпу”, 7, 8, ІО) и прочно вошедшие в молитвенный обиход последующих веков (сравн., напр., в „Последовании на сон грядущим” в современных молитвословах Молитва вторая). Вся молитва имеет большое значение для суждения о прочности и устойчивости церковных традиций и, в частности, о способах сохранения и передачи этих традиций.
The prayer of St. Methodius, known only from the Slavonic text, no doubt, belongs among the earliest Christian prayers. Its formulation and expression are extremely characteristic for evaluating the dogmatic discourse of the ante-Nicene era. Deserving of special attention is a passage in the prayer, which says the victory over death, suffering and killing of a perfect passionless and Immortal. Here you can meet and interbreed sloza and thought, already familiar to the ancient Christian Church (cf. Ignatius, “Epistle to Polycarp,” 3:2, Gregory of Neocaesarea, “Message to Theopompus”, 7, 8, 10) and entered the everyday life of prayer of later ages (compare, for example, in the “Succession before sleep” in the modern prayer book, Prayer Two). The whole prayer is important for judging the strength and stability of church traditions and, in particular, on how to preserve and pass on these traditions.
I’ve often wanted to interbreed sloza and thought, of course. Whatever sloza is. Nor did the previous sentence make sense to me either.
При чтении трактата „О прокаженин” следует помнить, что по замыслу автора это диалог.
9) When reading the treatise “On prokazhenin” should be remembered that the author’s idea is a dialogue.
Mine too, as it happens!
Ссылки на Свящ. Писание после цитат не принадлежат св. Мефодию. Они вставлены в текст перевода для удобства чтения, причем прямые цитаты снабжены ссылками в круглых ( ) скобках, а непрямые цитаты и реминисценции — в квадратных скобках [ ].
Quotation marks from Holy Scripture are not by St. Methodius. They have been inserted into the translation for readability, and direct quotations are provided with round brackets, and indirect quotations and reminiscences – in square brackets [].
I’m pretty sure I’m confused here. Does the text really put scripture in brackets? Or in quotes?
По связи речи следует здесь же отметить, что проф. Н. Г. Бонвеч совсем не затрагивает тему о наличии аграфов в творениях св. Мефодия.
Speech Communication should also be noted here that Prof. N. G. Bonwetsch does not affect the subject of the presence of agrapha in the works of St. Methodius.
Any ideas?
The final chunk is rather serious: it’s the list of manuscripts and libraries of the Old Slavonic text. Not that I can’t get a general idea: but specifically it’s not great.
Основной рукописью для работы над текстом названных творений явился „Сборник” XVI века, хранящийся в Ленинграде в Государственной Публичной Библиотеке имени Салтыкова-Щедрина (Q I 265).
Текст основной рукописи сличен с текстом следующих рукописей;
- Рукопись Библиотеки Академии Наук Союза ССР 16. 16. 2 (XVII в.).
- Рукопись Библиотеки им. Ленина из собрания Московской духовной академии №41, ранее находившаяся в Троице-Сергиевой Лавре (нач. XVII в.).
- Рукопись Государственного Исторического Музея из Синодального собрания №170 (XVI в.).
- Рукопись Библиотеки им. Ленина из собрания Моск. дух. академии № 40, написанная для Арсения Суханова (XVII в.).
- Рукопись Библиотеки им. Ленина из собрания Общества Истории и Древностей Российских № 137 (XVII в.).
Кроме указанных выше рукописей, были привлечены следующие;
- Рукопись Госуд. Исторического Музея из Уваровского собрания № 115 (XVI в.).
- Рукопись Госуд. Истор. Музея из собрания Чудовского монастыря № 233 (XVI — XVII в).
- Рукопись Госуд. Истор. Музея из собрания Чудовского монастыря № 205 (XVII в.).
- Рукопись Госуд. Истор. Музея из собрания Единоверческого монастыря № 12 (XVII в.).
- Рукопись Госуд. Истор. Музея из собрания Барсова № 264 (подделка — довольно искусная — под XVI век, воспроизводящая, по-видимому, слово в слово текст старинной рукописи, послужившей образцом для настоящей).
OK. This comes out as something like this:
The main manuscript for the text of these works is the Sbornik 11 of the XVI century, kept in the Leningrad State Public Library in the Saltykov-Shchedrin (QI 265) 10.
The main text was produced by collating the following manuscripts;
1) Manuscript Library of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR 16. 16. 2 (XVII century).
2) Lenin Manuscript Library, from the Collection of the Moscow Theological Academy, number 41, previously found in the Trinity-Sergius Lavra (the beginning of the XVII century.).
3) The manuscript of the State Historical Museum of the Synodal Assembly number 170 (XVI century).
4) Lenin Manuscript Library, from the collection of the Spiritual Academy of Moscow number 40, written for Arsenius Sukhanov (XVII century).
5) Lenin Manuscript Library, from the meeting of the Society of History and Russian Antiquities number 137 (XVII century).In addition to these manuscripts, the following were involved;
6) The manuscript gov’t. Historical Museum of Uvarov meeting ? 115 (XVI century).
7) The manuscript gov’t. History. The Museum from the collection of the monastery Chudovsky No 233 (XVI – XVII c).
8 ) The manuscript gov’t. History. The Museum from the collection of the monastery Chudovsky No 205 (XVII century).
9) The manuscript gov’t. History. The Museum from the collection of ? 12 Edinoverie monastery (XVII century).
10) The manuscript gov’t. History. The Museum from the collection of Autograph No 264 (a forgery – a rather ingenious one – from the XVI century, reproducing, apparently, word for word the text of an ancient manuscript that served as a model for this).
Could anyone with Russian skills help here? We need to get a reliable list of manuscripts, if we’re going to put it online, as some poor soul may one day make his travel plans by this!
But that’s it. Otherwise the 3,400 words is pretty much done.
A dull Saturday morning, and I went into town and visited the local library, in search of my book order from Tuesday. On entering my ears were assailed with music, from some device stationed on the enquiries desk, and there were stalls filling the main library area. Apparently the library had been turned into a tatty-looking craft fair for the day. Want to read and study? Well, tough.
The book I ordered had arrived. I’d ordered it online, and given my email address so that they could tell me if it had arrived, but I never got an email. Possibly it arrived yesterday, and I simply didn’t know?
Back home with it, and I found that some spotty-faced youth had taken his pencil to it, and filled it with underlinings and marginal notes and symbols, evidently in preparation for some college essay. But who wants their attention distracted by that when reading? So I had to spend half an hour with the rubber.
The book, of course, is Vermaseren’s Mithras, the secret god, 1963. It’s an interesting but infuriating book from so many points of view, because the great man didn’t feel the need for any footnotes. Even the sources for illustrations of monuments are not identified. The book starts as follows:
In Rome, about A.D. 400, a number of Christians, armed with axes, forced their way into a Mithraic temple on the Aventine, where they smashed the sculptures and cut gaping holes in the paintings. Once the persecuted, they were now the persecutors, and to their ever-growing numbers Mithras and his followers were regarded as deadly rivals.
What a vivid picture!
But there are no footnotes. So … on what is this based? Depressingly, this is fiction. Vermaseren is talking about the Mithraeum of Santa Prica, which he excavated. In the scholarly publication he identifies damage, and speculates that it might have been done at the fall of paganism by Christians. Well, so indeed it might; but we have no actual evidence for this, and surely we should not state as fact that which is only a theory? But in this popular version, the attack has become a fact.
Still, Vermaseren really did have all the data about Mithras at his fingertips, although the Cumontian theory blinded him as to its real impact. So the book is bound to contain a great deal of hard data, interwoven with fancy like this. I shall be reading it over the weekend, I think!
Meanwhile I still have a great deal to do. I need to finish up a page on the works of Hero of Alexandria, and write another on the manuscript tradition of his artillery manuals. Then I need to get back to Methodius and the Russian version that I acquired yesterday, and translate some of that.
I’m becoming rather disappointed with progress on the translation from German of Methodius De lepra. Since last week, only a handful of lines have been done, and those only after prompting. Total time spent on those can only have been 10 minutes or so. The translator is not re-reading what he writes, which means that some of the sentences are gibberish. In some cases the gibberish reflects an Old Testament quotation, and becomes clear if you look it up in one of the online English translations of the bible. The PDF that I gave the man signals biblical references at the foot of each page, but, although in difficulty, he doesn’t trouble to look them up — I have to do that. When I do, and send back a file with comments, I get no response. We’ll see. But I think this is clearly going pear-shaped. I’ve had to chase twice now, in a total of 6 pages, and I’m tired of it.
Today I got hold of photocopies of the pages of Bogoslovskie Trudy that contained materials from the Old Slavonic text of Methodius of Olympus (died 311 AD). I don’t know any Russian, but my theory was that I ought to be able to work with them anyway, thanks to Google translate.
My first task was to convert the photocopies into a PDF file. I scanned it as greyscale at 400 dpi. Since the photocopies were A3 (the journal being slightly too high to fit two pages on an A4 piece of paper), I had to use a guillotine to cut the paper in half, and wallpaper scissors to trim the odd page as I fed them into the sheet feeder of my Fujitsu Scansnap.
The PDF’s created, I then opened them in Finereader 11 Pro, and ran the OCR on it using Language = Russian. It worked fine! Indeed it worked nearly perfectly, as far as I could tell!
Then I copied a page to Google translate, and … it produced a very decent translation! Easily good enough to work out what was being said. Thus I started with this:
Ознакомление с содержанием этой — славянской — части литературного наследства св. Мефодия до настоящего времени было возможно только по изданиям проф. Н. Г. Бонвеча5. Но эти издания, при всех своих исключительных научных достоинствах, имеют одну своеобразную особенность: если греческий текст дается здесь в подлиннике — на основании наиболее авторитетных рукописей, — то для славянского текста имеется лишь немецкий перевод. Перевод этот сделан весьма тщательно, с хорошим знанием особенностей древнего славянского языка. Однако никто не станет оспаривать тот факт, что, как бы далеко ни ушел в своем развитии современный русский язык от того языка, на котором написаны уже не раз упоминающиеся здесь славянские рукописи, созвучность русского и древнеславянского языков (в самом обширном значении этого выражения) значительно больше, чем созвучность немецкого языка с языком славянским. Во всяком случае, для успеха перевода это обстоятельство имеет большое значение. Для русского читателя узнавать содержание творений св. Мефодия, сохранившихся только в славянском тексте, из немецкого перевода— значит, по меньшей мере, снижать познавательную ценность изучаемого материала. Таковы те соображения, которые явились побудительной причиной, заставившей автора этих строк заняться работой над славянскими рукописями творений св. Мефодия и предпринять опыт перевода некоторой части вышеназванных славянских текстов на современный русский язык.
And the output was this:
Familiarization with the content of this – Slavic – part of the literary heritage of St. Methodius so far been possible only on publications of Professor. NG Bonwetsch 5. But these books, for all their exceptional academic merit, have a peculiar feature: if the Greek text is given here in the script – based on the most authoritative manuscripts – something for Slavonic text, there is only a German translation. This translation is made very carefully, with good knowledge of the characteristics of the ancient Slavic language. However, no one will dispute the fact that, no matter how far gone in its development the modern Russian language from the language of the written many times referred to herein Slavic manuscripts, the consonance of the Russian and Old Slavic languages (in the broadest sense of the expression) is significantly more than the harmony of the German language with the language of the Slav. In any case, the success of translating this fact is of great importance. For the Russian reader to learn the content of the works of St. Methodius, preserved only in Slavonic text of the German translation, then, at least, reduce the informative value of the studied material. Such are the considerations that were motive that made the author of these lines to do work on Slavic manuscripts of St. creations. Methodius and experience to undertake the translation of some parts of the foregoing Slavonic texts of the modern Russian language.
Now that isn’t perfect — but I think we can all, with a bit of concentration, work out what is being said, bar a word here or there.
In this way, a non-Russian speaker like me can read part of the preface of Chub’s publication.
As someone said, doubtless in a similar context, “I love it when a plan comes together!”
UPDATE: Reading a few more pages, I come across a discussion of the manuscripts. I think, on the whole, it would probably be a good idea if I could attempt a translation of Chub’s preface in toto, by smoothing out the Google output. But not tonight!
The sun shone today, so I drove up to Cambridge University Library.
My first objective was the articles by archbishop Michael Chub in Bogoslovskie Trudy, which gave versions of the Slavonic text of Methodius. The articles appear in issue 2 (1961) and 3 (1964).
I don’t know a single letter of Russian, but the journal itself helped me quite a bit. Remember that this is the period of KGB control of the church. The journal was published by the Moscow Patriarchate, mainly to give a false impression of the freedom of the church in Soviet times. Being intended for export, it had a table of contents in English and French, and Arabic numbers for page numbers.
The articles also were accompanied by monochrome photographs of pages of the Slavonic manuscripts. Anyway I got a photocopy of the lot — slightly over A4, unfortunately, so some work with scissors will be necessary in order to scan it — and I will run it into PDF, OCR it, put it through Google Russian-English translate, and see what Dr Chub — let us hope that he wasn’t one of the KGB officers appointed as bishops — has to say.
It was a long drive to get this, and I had considered ordering a photocopy of the articles from my local library via the British Library. But it would probably have cost no less, and the copies that I have received through the latter have often been of very poor quality.
Last night I started writing a post on the bibliography of Hero of Alexandria. I took the opportunity to verify a couple of references. Amusingly, two of them were wrong! One volume was supposed to contain a load of English translations of Hero; in reality it was a commentary, and contained none. It is surprising how often people do not verify their references.
Meanwhile I have had a couple of interesting emails. Andrea Gehrtz, who has translated various works by Porphyry, has had a go at book 1 of the ancient astrological writer, Vettius Valens. It’s available for sale on Amazon.com here.
Another correspondent advises me that Beth Dunlop’s translation of 4 Christmas homilies is accessible here. The homilies are by John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Amphilochius of Iconium, and Gregory Nazianzen — all 4th century, and it is good to have access to them. I did write to Beth Dunlop years ago, asking if I might place these online, but had no response. Perhaps the author of this site has been more successful!