Slavonic Translation Research Articles

Rewritten Bible in the “Museum” Slavonic Translation of the Song of Songs

Summary The so-called “Museum” Slavonic translation of the Song of Songs contains a specific recension enrooted in Jewish Second Temple traditions. It becomes more plausible that the Slavonic translation has been produced in the earliest period of Slavic writing directly from Syriac rather than from Hebrew, as it was proposed earlier.

The Reception of “Slavonic Apocrypha”

Abstract This paper examines the history of scholarship on medieval Slavonic religious literature. The bulk of these writings have been studied either by biblical scholars or by Slavicists under the name of “Slavonic Apocrypha.” The fifteenth century manuscript, Slav 29, typifies this scholarship. Slavonic translations of Hellenistic pseudepigrapha were used by textual critics for the reconstruction of biblical literature. Biblical scholars praise Slav 29 as the source of the best version of the Hellenistic romance, Joseph and Aseneth. Slavicists-medievalists celebrate it as the manuscript of the Serbian poetic masterpiece, Slovoljubve (A Homage to Love). They study Slav. 29 as part of national Slavic literature. As a representative of medieval Slavic literature Slav 29 also includes biblical passages, theological discourses, historiographies, hagiographies, sermons, erotapokriseis, fables, medical prescriptions, and folk tales.

Slavonic Translation of the Apocryphal Questions of Bartholomew

Abstract The paper deals with the Slavonic translation of the apocryphal Questions of Bartholomew, a literary text written most likely in Greek in the 3rd or 4th century.

Bułgarski car Piotr i jego żona Maria Lekapena w Latopisie Helleńskim i Rzymskim drugiej edycji

The sequence concerning the reign of Peter and Maria Lekapene as well as the Byzantine-Bulgarian relations between 927 and 969 can be found in the second version of the Hellenic and Roman Chronicle. It is a vast historiographical work, whose authors attempted to demonstrate the history of medieval Rus against the broad background of universal history, drawing on the sources of Byzantine provenance known in Slavonic translation (mainly the chronicles of John Malalas and George Hamartolus). Given the fact that the Hellenic and Roman Chronicle does not contain information about the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks, the year 1453 is considered the terminus ante quem for the second version of the said chronicle, which is of interest to us here. Its oldest preserved copies come from the mid-fifteenth century. The passages about Maria and Peter are extensive. They include about six columns of text written in semi-uncial in the most representative copy of the second version of the Hellenic and Roman Chronicle, i.e. manuscript БАН, 33.8.13, which is dated to the last quarter of the fifteenth century. Reading them allows one to ascertain that they constitute only a reworded version of the Slavic translation of the relevant passages of the B-version of the Georgius Monachus Continuatus. The content of the Byzantine source is quoted here in full without any abbreviations or author’s additions. The differences between the text of БАН, 33.8.13 and the text of РГБ, собр. Ундольского [Ф. 310], № 1289 – constituting the basis for editing the translation of the Georgius Monachus Continuatus of the B-version – are limited only to the stylistic and editorial level, except for the changes resulting most probably from the copyist misunderstanding the meaning of the original.

«Откровение святого Григория Богослова о литургии»: исследования, текст и его славянские переводы

«Откровение святого Григория Богослова о литургии»: исследования, текст и его славянские переводы

Utjecaj tekstova latinskih rimskih sakramentara na crkvenoslavensku rimsku liturgiju (9. – 14. stoljeće)

The liturgical texts of the Church Slavonic sacramentaries (Kiev Leaflets, Vienna Leaflets, Sinai missal Sin. Slav. 5N and others) from the early stages of the Slavic liturgy (9th to 14th century) with its textological and euchological content mostly belong to the Roman rite. These texts are euchological texts with proper liturgical function: texts are written and arranged for the celebration of the Mass and they are preserved in the liturgical book called sacramentary. The medieval Latin liturgical textological tradition is divided into two branches: Gelasian and Gregorian, which formed a unique textological tradition in parts of Northern Italy and Transalpine countries (from Aquileia to Salzburg) establishing a new textological tradition known as the »Gelasianized-Gregorian Sacramentary«, which was used in the mentioned parts of Central Europe. Based on the research of the history of Old Church Slavonic liturgy and historical and comparative analysis of Latin and Church Slavonic texts, mostly conducted for the doctoral thesis entitled Historical and liturgical peculiarities of the early stages of the Slavonic liturgy, this study presents influences of Latin liturgical textological tradition from Central Europe on the oldest Church Slavonic translations of sacramentaries from 9th to 14th century and other liturgical texts, mainly euchological, which continued to exist in the Croatian Glagolitic tradition even after the liturgical reform at the end of the 13th century.

Textology of Early Printed Cyrillic Tetraevangelions in Middle Bulgarian and Serbian Recensions and their Relation to the Manuscript Tradition (Gospel of Mark, Pericopes 1–9)

Of about 120 early printed liturgical Tetraevangelions only nine Church Slavonic tetras of the Middle Bulgarian recension, and three of the Serbian recensions, have survived. All of them were printed in the 16th century. Textual analysis of the Gospel of Mark (zachalas 1–9) demonstrates differences between the text of East Slavonic Tetraevangelions and others, i.e. Middle Bulgarian and Serbian ones. Comparing them with the manuscript material proves that, from the textual point of view, eleven Tetraevangelions of Middle Bulgarian and Serbian recensions are in a close relation to the first edition of the Church Slavonic translation of the Gospel text. This is particularly noticeable in the later Middle Bulgarian tetras printed from 1560 to 1582. The early Middle Bulgarian (issued from 1512 to 1553) and all Serbian Tetraevangelions share textual variants that can be attributed to the Commentary on the Gospels by Theophylact of Ohrid.

“Diatriba de Europaeorum linguis” by Joseph Justus Scaliger and the Church Slavonic Translation of the 17th century

The article contains a linguistic analysis of the Church Slavonic translation of a short fragment of one of the chapters from the Latin-language geographical atlas compiled by the Dutch cartographers Willem and Joan Blaeu in the first half of the 17th century. The fragment we’re interested in is the Diatriba de Europaeorum linguis (Diatribe on the Languages of the Europeans) by Joseph Justus Scaliger, written in 1599 and published in 1610. Joan and Willem Blaeu include the complete text in their chapter on Europe. The translation of the first part of the Atlas, which contained this chapter, was carried out by Epiphanius Slavinetsky in 1650s in Moscow, and is preserved in the author’s draft, as well as in the clean copy made by a Moscow scribe, both of which are located today in the State Historical Museum manuscript collection. The language of this translation provides a vivid example of the “scholarly” register of Church Slavonic, which was developing at the time, indeed, amongst Slavinetsky’s circle of companions. The article is mainly concerned with the lexical structure of the translation; creation of new words, expanding meanings of lexemes and use of rare Church Slavonic words are characteristic for the Atlas’ translation as a whole, and they have been found in the analysed fragment in particular. We are also inspecting some graphical and orthographic specifics of the translation, mainly the ways of interpreting personal names, which are fairly frequent in a geographical text. The article includes the full text of Scaliger’s Diatribe according to the 1645 edition of the Blaeu’s Atlas, with marked differences from the original edition of 1610, as well as Slavinetsky’s Church Slavonic translation according to the manuscript kept in the State Historical Museum (Moscow).

Theodosius “the Greek”, Kliment Smoliatich, and the Unnamed Patriarch

The article addresses the issue of dating a Church Slavonic translation from Greek of Pope Leo the Great’s Tome to Archbishop Flavian of Constantinople (449), confirmed by the Fourth Ecumenical Council as an essential document of dogma (451). So far the translation has been dated as widely as the 12th century. The existing interpretations were mainly concerned with the biography of the translator, a monk Theodosius, who lived in the Kievan Rus' in the 12th century and is thought to have been an abbot of the Kievan Caves monastery (A. Shakhmatov’s version) or a cleric under the metropolitan (E. Golubinski’s version). Dwelling on the second of these suggestions, and adding his own hypothesis that Theodosius was educated in Byzantium, at the Orphanotropheion of St. Paul, the author of the article goes on to elucidate an obscure passage in Theodosius’s introduction to the Slavic translation of the Tome with a mention of an unnamed patriarch and to further hypothesize about the date of the translation: supposedly the translation activities took place at the time when Kliment Smoliatich was the nominal head of the Kievan metropoly and thus can be dated between September 1149 and April 1151. The final part of the article addresses the issue from a different perspective, discussing Theodosius’s introduction in the context of Old Slavonic hymnography. It interprets the phrase about the unnamed ʽPatriarch’ in the view of the Slavonic text of a church service devoted to Pope Leo and held in monasteries, thus producing a more exact date for the translation, February 18, 1151.

The Feast Days of Slavic Saints as Part of the Stishnoy Prologue from the 15th – 17th Centuries

This article studies the structure of the Stishnoy Prologue (Synaxarion), an artefact of Old Church Slavonic writing containing brief lives of the saints, hagiography, and moralising stories arranged in accordance with the calendar. There are many unsolved issues concerning the history of the translation of the Stishnoy Prologue into the Slavic language and its existence in Russia between the 14th and 17th centuries. These issues have to do with the sources, the peculiarities of its copies, and the role played by the hagiographies and moralising texts in different manuscripts. The author aims to clarify the structure of the Stishnoy Prologue and the description of Slavic saints’ lives corresponding to their anniversaries. In order to draw a typological classification of the 40 copies of the spring and summer parts of the Stishnoy Prologue from the 15th–17th centuries in their Russian, Serbian, and Bulgarian versions, the author uses the linguo-textological method, dividing all the manuscripts into five groups. As a result of the study, the author singles out nine hagiographies devoted to Slavic saints and supposedly written by Slavic authors. Three saints’ lives describing the earliest events in Christian history (early 4th century AD, 351, 812) can be found in all the copies of the document, which means these texts were part of the original Slavic translation of the Stishnoy Prologue from Greek. The commemoration of Holy Prince Wenceslaus (Vyacheslav) of the Czechs can be found in all the Russian copies, while the life of Methodius, Bishop of Moravia (characterising the Khutyn group of manuscripts), was included into the Stishnoy Prologue after its appearance in Russia in the 14th century. Additionally, the author discovered descriptions of the lives of the most venerated Bulgarian St John of Rila and St Prince Lazar of Serbia in only two out of the fifteen South Slavic manuscripts, both dating back to the 17th century. This testifies to the fact that the South Slavs demonstrated a stronger adherence to tradition when copying texts. The author also points out that the life of the Bulgarian St George the New can only be found in the 16th-century copy of the Stishnoy Prologue. It also contains a number of Russian and Slavic saints canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church after the Councils of 1547 and 1549. Finally, the author concludes that the presence of the lives of Slavic saints in the Stishnoy Prologue is an important typological feature to be taken into account when characterising the existing manuscripts.

The Pseudepigraphical “Life of Moses” in the “Tichonravov’s Chronograph” and in the Biblical Compendium from the Collection of thе Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius

The article's goal is to study and publish the text of a specific Slavic-Russian version of the apocryphal Life of Moses, previously unknown, which was identified in two manuscripts in the Russian State Library (both from the late 15th century), namely in the Tikhonravov’s Chronograph from the collection of handwritten books of N. S. Tikhonravov and in the Biblical Compendium from the collection of thе Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius. The remaining versions of the apocryphon have been known to date as parts of Great Menaion Reader, Barsov’s Palaea Interpretata and Complete chronographic Palaea. Both new copies of the apocryphon were included in an extensive fragment of a previously unknown Old Russian chronograph based, firstly, on the Biblical books of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers and the Book of Job, as well as on an unknown Slavic translation of Judean Antiquities by Josephus, and on the following Apocrypha (in addition to the Life of Moses): Lesser Genesis (The Book of Jubilees), Death of Abraham and Genesis of Esau. The original feature of the chronograph is a compilation story of Joseph and his brothers, composed of fragments from the full version of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Tale of Joseph the Beautiful by St. Ephraim the Syrian and the famous Letter to Presbyter Khoma from Metropolitan Kliment Smoliatich. Main distinctive features of the Life of Moses published in this article are identified and analyzed: 1) a different sequence of the narration; 2) several individual readings–including primary ones, ascending to the Jewish original; 3) literary and stylistic differences; 4) four insertions, which have correlations with the Greek Chronicon of George Kedrenos and were partially reflected in the Short chronographic Palaea and in the Speech of the Scholar from the Old Russian Tale of Past Years. In addition, some revisions and inserts were discovered in the biblical Compendium of Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, which are based on the Slavic-Russian translation of the Historical Palaea. The final result of the study is presented as a stemma of relations between the editions of the apocryphon.

Paulicians Between the Dogme and the Legend

The paper compares how Paulicians were described in different types of medieval Slavonic sources by using the approach of the linguistic and culturological conceptualization of the alterity. By means of linguistic analysis, it tries to reach some essential dogmatic issues in the Paulician doctrine, and to focalize on the perception models towards Paulicians with their tangible semantic codes according to the specificities of the medieval world view. The two chosen texts the analysis is based on, are the legendary Bulgarian narrative Sermon about how the Paulicians have been conceived, and the Slavonic translation of 24th title of Panoplia Dogmatica by Euthymius Zigabenus. The analysis is followed by an English translation of the Sermon (insofar known in 8 copies), and a partial edition of the Slavonic translation of Zigabenus’s work upon the unique copy from the manuscript BAR 296, Library of the Romanian Academy of Sciences in Bucharest, dated between 1410–1420. The text account from the Slavonic manuscript is published for the first time, giving supplementary details about the overall Slavonic translation.

К вопросу о времени и месте возникновения первого славянского перевода Жития Святого Афанасия Афонского

К вопросу о времени и месте возникновения первого славянского перевода Жития Святого Афанасия Афонского

고대슬라브어 번역에서 어휘적 다양성과 형태적 통일성의 상관관계 연구

고대슬라브어 번역에서 어휘적 다양성과 형태적 통일성의 상관관계 연구

Первый русский перевод книг Ветхого Завета с древнееврейского языка

This paper proposes new data to the study of Russian Bible translations history. It introduces to the manuscript which is called Opyt perevoda tochnago vethosvyaschennyh knig iz podlinnago evreyskogo na rossiyskiy, po evreyskomu perevodu kak oni samy perevodyat, s prilozheniem nekotoryh ih iz’yasneniy uchinen namestnikom iereem Mikhailom Fotinskim 1806 goda and is kept in the Russian State Library. It is commonly supposed the first Russian Old Testament Translation was made by Gerasim Pavskij during the work of Russian Bible Society. But Fotinskij’s translation is earlier one. This translation hasn’t been described, studied and published before. In the article main peculiarities of the translation are described. It is the new-type translation which breaks off with the tradition of Church Slavonic translations. The purpose of the translation is interpretation of Judaic exegesis, and the method is literal. Additionally, translator’s stylistic conception is examined. The language of the translation is characterized as a variant of the Russian language by XVIII–XIX centuries with archaic, vernacular and Ukrainian elements.

The Byzantine Narration of Our Father Agapius and Its Slavonic Translation

The paper introduces the Greek original of the hagiographic text The Narration of Our Father Agapius (presumably from the 5th–6th centuries), which was widely known in Slavonic tradition but remains almost unknown neither to historians of Byzantine culture and to Slavists. The paper consists of two parts. Drawing upon the critical edition of the text, the first part discusses the peculiarities of the Greek tradition. The manuscript from Athens is much more accurate than the second of the two existing Greek manuscripts, from St. Petersburg. Nevertheless, in some cases the Athenian manuscript is defective. Thus, the first culmination of the narrative, the description of the theophany in the Garden of Paradise, is absent. The episode of the raising of the dead son of a widow is also reduced, probably due to its somewhat magical flavor. However, the manuscript from St. Petersburg in its second part is inferior to the Athenian manuscript reducing vast descriptions—prayers and various details of the rites. A comparison of the two Greek manuscripts reveals vivid folkloric and evangelic images of the Greek original that were concealed by various mistakes made by scribes. The second part of the article compares the Greek original of the Narration with the Slavonic translation. The text from the Uspenskij Sbornik is the main focus of the comparison, but other evidence from the South and East Slavonic traditions are also taken into account. The translation eliminated quite a few major traces of the Greek original. Thus, an intimate first-person narration and a striking detail in which the main character himself tells about his death are eliminated. The names of Paradise sites, theological discourses, exhortations, any vast descriptions disappear. The adjusted symbolic structure of the Narration that reveals the transformation of the character from myst to mystagogue is eliminated in the Slavonic tradition and the main idea of the Greek text—the idiorythmia predominating over the koinobion—is scarcely readable. In the Slavonic tradition the text becomes more and more similar to a fairytale.

«Гораций для Марины Мнишек»: герои Смутного времени в поэзии Себастьяна Петрици

The historical analysis of “Horatius Flaccus in the works of the Moscow prisoner” is made, the outstanding work of Polish Renaissance era, written by Dr Sebastian Petritsi - Professor of Krakow University and the doctor of the family of Marina Mnishek. Biographical information about the scientist’s life and the circumstances in which he had been staying in the Moscow state for a year and a half are covered. Political motives are characterized, based on which Petritsi translated the odes and epodes by Horace. On the one hand, this work had as propaganda and urged the Poles to start a war with Muscovite state. On the other hand, it once again “raised from the dead” the Tsar False Dmitry I killed by a boyar conspiracy and gave the reader hope that he still could be saved. Thirdly, the work had a psychological impact - stilled captive Polish aristocrats, who came to the wedding of Marina Mnishek. Attention is drawn to the fact that the first in the history of Slavic literature complete translation of the lyric works of Horace was carried out with the support of the family Mnishek and dedicated to them by the author. It is concluded that it can serve as a valuable historical source for the psychological characteristics of the Polish participants in the events of the Time of Troubles.

“The Word for Mercy” in the Church Slavonic Translation of the Second Half of the 17th Century and Its Polish Original: Realia Interpretation

“The Word for Mercy” was considered to be an original essay, written by Epiphanius Slavinetsky or Euthymius Chudovsky. In fact, it is a translation of Piotr Skarga’s cognominal sermon. The Church Slavonic translation is an example of the so-called inter-confessional rendering of the Polish original that shows its adaptation to the Orthodox tradition and to Russian historical and cultural specificity. The present paper analyses the problems of realia interpretation in the Church Slavonic translation of the Polish source. A distinctive feature of the translation is the elimination of specific signs of the Polish origin of the text. The translator pretends that a translated text is an original composition. To achieve this goal, he changes or omits the names of the Western saints. As markers indicating its place within the Byzantine tradition, he uses Greek lexical borrowings. Making a choice between lexical equivalents for transmission of the foreign realia, the translator probably uses multilingual lexicons such as the Thesaurus Polono-Latino-Graecus by Grzegorz Knapiusz and the Trilingual Lexicon by Epiphanius Slavinetsky. Very similar methods characterize the works of Simeon of Polotsk. Thus, it was not only the practice of the Chudov Monastery bookmen, but also Muscovite prevailing practice. “The Word for Mercy” is a unique example of adaptation of the Western ideas of state charity to the Russian situation in the second half of the 17th century. The ideological changes in the translation give this sermon features of the socio-legal project that is the hallmark of Early Modern times.

An Old Church Slavonic Tale about a Sinful Mother (Sinodik, Patericon, Synaxarion, Izmaragd) and Its Greek Original (BHG 1449d)

The paper aims to identify the Greek original of an Old Church Slavonic tale included in the Old Russian Sinodik and known in manuscript copies from the 16th c. Previously, the tale was provisionally ascribed to the Latin tradition and thought to have reached the Old Russian literature via a Polish milieu. Recent attempts to identify its Greek original remained unsuccessful. The author argues that the tale is an Old Church Slavonic translation of the Byzantine text BHG 1449d, a spiritually beneficial writing ascribed to Paul of Monemvasia (second half of the 10th c.). The same translation is presented in East Slavonic manuscript copies of the Patericon, the Plain and Versed Synaxarion, and the Izmaragd. The earliest of the newly identified manuscript copies is dated to the first half of the 15th c. The article also contains an edition of the Old Church Slavonic translation (according to the manuscript copy in Moscow, Russian State Library, Collection of the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, No. 701, Patericon, 1469) in parallel with the Greek original according to the scholarly edition of the manuscript version contained in a Greek codex of the 14th c. (ca 1330).

About the Origin of the First Slavic Translation of the Instructions by St. Dorotheus of Gaza

In the article the first Slavic translation of the Instructions by St. Dorotheus of Gaza, which was preserved in two Russian manuscripts from the 14th century, is studied (Berlin State Library, Cod. Hamilton 381 and State Historical Museum, Moscow, Cod. Chud. 14). The investigation of the language in comparison with the second translation (according to the edition of K. Dimitrov) and the Greek text made it possible to distinguish a number of Russianisms and to suggest an idea of its Old Russian origin. This translation is closest to translations of the first group according to the A. Pichkhadze classification, namely, to his special sub-group: the Pandectes by Nikon of Montenegro and the Catecheses by St. Theodore the Studite. The translation contains a lot of mistakes, it is not understandable, and it does not always follow the word-for-word principle. The composition of the Instructions in the first and second translations is different: in the first translation there is an epilogue created by the disciples of St. Theodore the Studite, while the second translation does not include this. This suggests that the Greek original of the first translation was somehow connected with the Monastery of Stoudios in Constantinople. The creation of the South Slavonic translation in the middle of the 14th century led to the complete elimination of the early Old Russian translation.