Original scientific paper
The Croatian Church Slavonic translation of the texts of st. Thomas Aquinas
Ana Kovačević
; Old Church Slavonic Institute, Zagreb
Milan Mihaljević
orcid.org/0000-0003-3702-2388
; Old Church Slavonic Institute, Zagreb
Sandra Sudec
orcid.org/0000-0002-8875-651X
; Old Church Slavonic Institute, Zagreb
Abstract
This work is a description of the language of the Croatian Church Slavonic translation of the texts from the Office of the Corpus Christi feast written by St. Thomas Aquinas. The texts of the Office comprise Hvali Sione – Laud O Zion (Lauda, Sion) preserved in the Croatian Glagolitic missals and three liturgical hymns: Vspoi êzikь – Sing My Tongue (Pange, lingua), Častnimь prazdnikomь – At this our Solemn Feasts (Sacris solémniis), Glasь izide ot višnihь / Slovo višnee ishodeĉee – The Word of God (Verbum supérnum) and Slovo sv. Tome Akvinskoga – A Reading by St. Thomas Aquinas, all in the Croatian Glagolitic breviaries. In addition to the comparative translation analysis, the texts from the Office are presented with the parallel Latin sources as well as the critical apparatus comprising all known Croatian Glagolitic sources in which the office has been preserved. The comparative analysis of the breviary office shows that there are older and more recent translations of the three hymns and the Slovo. The older translations are freer and less literal than more recent ones that are more faithful to the original source on the level of content and structure. An older translation does not always presume the language conservatism, especially when we look at its morphology. The characteristics of more recent translations are lexical and syntactic innovations according to the Latin source. With very few exceptions the freer and older translations may be found in Vb2, Pad, Pm, Drag, Rom and in the first part of the Corpus Christi feast office in Metr i Vb3, while the more recent literal translations are preserved in Mosk, Lab2, Vat5, Vat6, Metr and Vb3 in the part of the feast octave and in the printed breviaries: Kos, Bar and Broz. The special (transitional) group consists of N1, N2, Brib, Dab, Vat19 and Vat10, which, as a whole, have more recent translation, but here and there they have preserved the older one. The Mavr has a special place because, like Metr and Vb3, it combines both older and more recent translations.
It is significant that this kind of distribution in many ways matches the state found in the period after the third revision of the Croatian Glagolitic codices, in which the difference between the Glagolitic North and Southis visible. The translations in the North are older while those in the South are more recent ones. The transitional group is concentrated in the central Vinodol – Lika region. Two different attitudes toward the Latin source are not so obvious in the missal Sequence. It is significantly different only in the Kožičić’s Missal. The office of Corpus Christi confirms that the linguistic revision did not take place only in the biblical texts which had to be harmonized with the Vulgate, as it is usually highlighted in literature, but also in the non biblical contents. Although translated from Latin, they had to be harmonized again with the Latin missal and breviary texts because of their earlier freer translations.
According to the oldest known missals and breviaries (MVat4, BrVat5, BrPad, BrVb2) and their linguistic characteristics, as well as the scribe mistakes which show that there were already several copies before their translation, it can be concluded that the Corpus Christi office by St. Thomas Aquinas was translated into Croatian Church Slavonic very soon after it was written in the 13th century.
Keywords
Croatian Church Slavonic language; Croatian Glagolitic texts; St. Thomas Aquinas; Corpus Christi
Hrčak ID:
65878
URI
Publication date:
31.12.2010.
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