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Church Slavic textual parallels in the translation of John Chrysosthomes's homily "I ježe ne suditi na lica"
Olga Nedeljković
Sažetak
Church Slavic textual parallels in the translation of John Chrysosthomes's homily "I ježe ne suditi na lica"
A study of two or more versions of the same text, written in only one redaction or in different ones, offers a possibility of manyfold textual analysis, as we have attempted to do in this papaer where a Russian (Uspenskij Sbornik) and a Serbian (Mihanović Homiliar) versions of John Chrysosthome's homily "I ježe ne suditi na lica" were compared.
A parallel study of textual variants permits us, first of all, to establish their original or common textual source. This is not always an easy task (even when one deals with the large group of identical texts, as are, for example, the Gospels and the Acts and Epistles of the Apostles), because the first common ("svodni") translation is present in all of the preserved variants in codices as well as any other type of a given text. As our analysis shows, in both Slavic textual parallels under investigation, beside numerous mistakes which considerably and sometimes completely obliterate the meaning of the texts, there are also many structural lexical, morphological and syntactical variants, so that neither of the two redactions, in spite of their clear dependence on an original OCS translation, reflects faithfullly that OCS original. This is particularly obvious when compared to the preserved original Greek text of this homily. The least amount of differences exist in the Biblical quotations, which form more than one fifth of the (whole) text. However, in the passages which were not protected by the sacred authority of the original, the translators allowed themselves great liberties in their creative search for beautiful synoyms, which in most cases do not adequatly translate the right shade of meaning found in the original text. Sometimes these are only metaphors of a more or less similar meaning, but they are often completely wrong, and may, in certain cases, obliterate the understanding of the texts. This substitution of original words by the new ones, as well as differences in choice of more suitable syntactic constructions, seem to indicate that the two texts under investigation represent two completely separate and independent versions in spite of a whole series of identical sentences (when the two texts strictly follow the original) with unusual constructions and rare expressions, which clearly point to a common "ancestor", an OCS translation. In both cases, the redactors did their job very conscientiously and consulted the Greek original, which obviously presented great problems both for the original translator and the later scribes, because of Chrysosthome's daring style.
The Russian text (Uspenskij sbornik) follows its OCS original more faithfully than Mihanović's text in the syntactical strucutres and grammatical constructions, and somewhat less faithfully, as it seems, in the lexis in which the Russian scribe often freely paraphrased the original meaning. It seems that he even conciously introduced certain lexical changes in an attempt to match the powerful expression of the Greek original.
On the other hand, the scribe of the Mih. in many cases attempted to translate the Greek text anew or at least to find a more adequate translation for individual words. He often failed in this effort, and, as a result, the Mih. text is often unclear. One should point out, however, that this scribe occasionally did a better job than the one worked on the Usp. sbornik. All the mentioned features are abundantly exemplified in both texts under investigation.
A paralel investigation of two (or more) versions of the same recopied text also provides us with a possibility to reconstruct the full, complete text in cases when in one version some passages are missing, either omission by the redactor. (This is the case, for example, with our Mih. Homily where a whole page is missing with a part of the text which in the Usp. sbornik contains as much as 117 lines). Of great importance on this process is the reconstruction of the omitted or incorrectly quoted words and passages, resulting also from scribal errors or, later, from the conjectures of publishing.
Finally, this kind of textual analysis permits us also to read correctly those words which are not clear in one version, and whose meaning is otherwise impossible to decipher from their own context. Such analysis is particular valuable in dealing with very rare and old expressions, especially in cases when a Greek original is not available. The most intersting cases of this kind found in Usp. sbornik and the Mih. Hom. are explained in the list of the synonyms and textual variants at the end of this paper.
Ključne riječi
Hrčak ID:
14257
URI
Datum izdavanja:
30.9.1977.
Posjeta: 1.520 *