{"id":52850,"date":"2024-12-17T18:30:35","date_gmt":"2024-12-17T18:30:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/?p=52850"},"modified":"2024-12-17T18:30:35","modified_gmt":"2024-12-17T18:30:35","slug":"review-a-translation-of-the-life-of-saint-bede-bhl-1069-from-scriptorium-press","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/2024\/12\/17\/review-a-translation-of-the-life-of-saint-bede-bhl-1069-from-scriptorium-press\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: A translation of the “Life of Saint Bede” (BHL 1069) from Scriptorium Press"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scriptorium Press<\/a> have kindly sent me two of their volumes for review.\u00a0 The first of these is the Life of Saint Bede the Venerable<\/em> (72 pages, C$12).\u00a0 ISBN 9798869903341.\u00a0 I wrote some notes on this before my injury.\u00a0 The other is Saints of Ethiopia<\/em> (140 pages, C$16).\u00a0 ISBN 9798300901172, and unfortunately a review of this will have to wait.<\/p>\n

The Bede book is published using Amazon Createspace.\u00a0 The title page gives the authors as Anthony Pavoni and Evangelos Nikitopoulos.<\/p>\n

It is not clear to me who is the intended audience for the volumes of this series, which consists of translations of hagiographical texts.\u00a0 This is not a series aimed at academics, like the Sources Chr<\/em>\u00e9tiennes<\/em>.\u00a0 I suspect that it is aimed at a devotional audience.\u00a0 But it is very useful for everyone to have them, especially as here where the translation is the first.<\/p>\n

The \u201cLife of Bede\u201d is a translation of BHL 1069, a hagiographic text of the late 11th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 The editors do not make clear what Latin text they used, but they list an edition of the text of J. A. Giles in their appendix.\u00a0 I would advise the editors to add a note at the end of their introduction \u2013 maybe a translator\u2019s preface \u2013 specifying exactly which text they used.<\/p>\n

John Allen Giles produced a complete edition of the works of Bede in twelve volumes during 1843 and 1844, and this is the edition reprinted in the Patrologia Latina<\/em>.\u00a0 The Vita Bedae<\/em> appears in volume 1 (1843), pp. cxliii<\/a>-clx.\u00a0 The only footnote tells us that the text is almost entirely a reprint of the text printed by John Smith in his 1722 edition of the Historia Ecclestiastica<\/em><\/a>, pp.815-822, because Giles says that he collated it against a British Museum manuscript.<\/p>\n

This Dr Giles led a rather curious life.\u00a0 Although an amiable person, his life included a jail sentence for falsifying a church register out of an unwise kindness to an unfortunate maidservant.\u00a0 The DNB gives the story<\/a>. \u00a0Much of his work was done in haste for cash, and critical opinion of it is low.\u00a0 \u00a0There is still a need to collate the eight manuscripts<\/a> and produce a critical edition of the text.\u00a0 At least one of these, Durham Cathedral Library B.II.35 is online, and the text begins on fol.119r<\/a>.\u00a0 But this is outside the scope of the series.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Durham Cathedral Library B.II.35, fol. 119r – excerpt, showing start of the Vita Bedae<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The book begins with an introduction to Bede, useful to the general reader.\u00a0 Indeed the book itself would fit well in a church bookstall, perhaps at Durham Cathedral.\u00a0 The translation itself is pages 37-61.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The account by Symeon of Durham of the \u201cTranslation of the Relics of Bede\u201d is pp.62-5, followed by a list of English titles of the works of Bede, and a short bibliography.<\/p>\n

The translation itself is clear and readable.\u00a0 But any reviewer of a new translation from anything but a major academic publisher will face a novel, and awkward question: is the translation genuine, or the product of AI?\u00a0 This is an unwelcome new problem.<\/p>\n

The only way to assess this was to translate a portion of the text myself, and also to see what AI and Google Translate made of Giles\u2019 Latin.\u00a0 This I did, for the first page of the text, and I found that the translation was generally accurate, and it displayed no traces of AI-generated language.\u00a0 I had intended to do further sampling, but my injury has made this impossible at this time.<\/p>\n

So… this is a useful item indeed.\u00a0 The price is cheap, the translation is serviceable.\u00a0 Well done them!<\/p>\n

I attach a word file of the Latin text of the Giles edition, in case it is of use to others:\u00a0 Vita Bedae BHL 1069 Giles 1843<\/a> (.docx)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scriptorium Press have kindly sent me two of their volumes for review.\u00a0 The first of these is the Life of Saint Bede the Venerable (72 pages, C$12).\u00a0 ISBN 9798869903341.\u00a0 I wrote some notes on this before my injury.\u00a0 The other is Saints of Ethiopia (140 pages, C$16).\u00a0 ISBN 9798300901172, and unfortunately a review of this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19],"tags":[284,322],"class_list":["post-52850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-my-diary-announcements","tag-bede","tag-book-reviews"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52850\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}