Take the trail

RJ: Father Gregory, please tell us about your translation “roots”.

V.L.: My work is mainly patrolology, the study of the Fathers of the Church (and all sorts of heretics at the same time), that is, interpretation, and interpretation is impossible without translation. However, I do not consider myself a translator. In my translation, only one book was published (St. Gregory of Nyssa “On the Constitution of Man”), and besides this I translate only texts that are especially interesting to me (for example, a fragment of Papias of Hierapolis, preserved in translation from lost Greek, will soon be published in the new edition of the Apostolic Men into ancient Armenian; I translated it into Russian, but because the translation in this case required a very detailed interpretation - disclosure of quotes, etc.). I am interested in translating myself fragments of texts in ancient languages ​​that are analyzed in my articles. Usually they are understood by me because previous translators and publishers did not understand them. Often such a translation leads to a clarification of the text itself in the original (the correct choice of discrepancies in the manuscripts or even a justified conjecture - after all, very often such “obscure” passages were not understood by medieval editors and copyists, who sometimes created whole bacchanalia of discrepancies in the manuscripts).

The real translator of patristic texts from Greek, by vocation, is, in my opinion, Alexey Georgievich Dunaev.

True, to be completely precise, in Soviet times I even officially worked as a translator - of all technical literature from French and English. But even then, he preferred not to do translations, but to search for information in foreign language files...

RJ: Do you think there is some common cultural denominator that brings together different translation experiences - from fiction to non-fiction?

V.L.: Both translations of patristics and translations of scientific and technical texts have in common that knowledge of the subject is more important than knowledge of the language. Both are required, but in different quantities; More knowledge of the subject is required.

Actually, my interest in the subject stimulated my first translation studies. It turned out that you cannot depend on the translator: if you want to delve into the text as deeply as possible, then you should see not just one ready-made translation, but, if possible, all translation options. In addition, it must be borne in mind that the most important passages of any text are often the most original, that is, the most difficult to translate. If a translator simply translates such a text in a row, then he can translate such passages correctly only if he is familiar with the special research devoted to these passages. But such research may not exist in nature, and even if it exists, not every translator can get to it, but only one who was lucky by chance or one who took the trouble √ and this is already a scientific work √ systematically study all scientific literature about the text being translated.

Therefore, it happens that you read a translation of a text from a language that you started studying two weeks ago, and you see that some part really scratches your ears. You start to figure it out and immediately see that the translator is being “wise”. You begin to understand more deeply, read dictionaries and grammars, √ at the same time you quickly progress in learning the language √ and come to the correct translation. Then you go to a specialist in this language, he checks you, corrects you in small things, if necessary. This is how you achieve the truth.

RJ: There is an opinion that a translator’s mistake is sometimes akin to a diagnostician’s mistake: linguistic and interpretative inaccuracies can lead to fundamental cultural distortions. Is there any exaggeration here?

V.L.: One of the standard sources of translation errors when working with ancient texts is what is now (in secular literary criticism) sometimes called, very roughly, “centonism,” that is, speaking not in words, but in quotations. To adequately read such a text, you yourself need to have all the relevant quotes in your head and in the appropriate language. For example, to translate Christian texts, the Bible should be remembered either in Greek (even if you are translating from some Syriac), or in any other language into which the Bible was translated specifically from Greek; Church Slavonic is suitable here - with it you can easily navigate biblical quotations even in the midst of Ethiopian. But the Russian text of the Bible is not only unsuitable, but also confusing, since it is very different in meaning from the Greek text that underlies all Eastern Christian bibles. Therefore, I try to never even read the Bible in Russian, so as not to spoil my hearing, as it is harmful for a musician who is not very confident in himself to listen to a false performance of music.

The consequences of errors from unrecognized quotes are sometimes so fatal that they disrupt the course of science for entire centuries - and all because of the isolation of scientists and translators, people who are too secular, from the everyday life of their “objects”. Just in my book “The Calling of Abraham,” dedicated to early monasticism, I had to deal with such a phenomenon. There were many cases of misrecognition of quotes by previous translators, since the Egyptian monks of the 4th century simply spoke in continuous quotations from the Bible, creating almost a “postmodernist” discourse, playing up the meaning of the quote in its original context, √ but an episode fatal for an entire line of research, there was one: the famous words of St. Athanasius of Alexandria in the “Life of St. Anthony” he wrote that Anthony did not study “literate” (as in the original Greek). In all publications until 1991, for several centuries from the 17th century, these words were taken as a statement of Antony's illiteracy. But this contradicted other information about him, for example, that he wrote some messages. And it is not very likely that Saint Anthony, having spent his childhood and early youth in a rich family, could remain illiterate. So many theories arose - like that he did not write his messages, but dictated them, or that he was illiterate only in Greek, but could write in his native Coptic language... But in 1991, a remarkable book was published (and almost not the most profound living) historian of monasticism, the Benedictine Father Adalbert de Vogüe, who showed that Athanasius applied to Saint Anthony the exact quotation from the Gospel that originally referred to Jesus. We are talking about the episode where the people are surprised at Jesus’ understanding of the Holy Scriptures, knowing that He did not receive a special theological education - “not studying books,” as stated in the Slavic translation. In the original Greek there is “grammata” - which can be translated both “books” and “gramma” (as the translators and interpreters of the “Life of St. Anthony” incorrectly did), and this simply means the lack of special education of a scribe. Therefore, Anthony was not at all illiterate, but only did not have a special education.

RJ: Do you have any translation preferences?

V.L.: Honestly speaking, translations of such entirely intertextual ancient texts are my favorite type of translation. In the book The Calling of Abraham there are many examples of translation of individual quotations, especially where we are talking about documents from the circle of St. Pachomius the Great (extant in Coptic, Greek and Latin). I don’t even know why: either I like this manner myself and my upbringing affects postmodern culture, or in fact (subjectively it seems to me this way) ancient sermons and messages written in such a manner contain some unknown depths of meaning, to which you can come √ almost completely alone, since almost none of the current scientists go there, √ and scoop, scoop, scoop... In particular, it was in this “encrypted” form that the Christian tradition of the 4th-7th centuries preserved a huge amount of information about the era that has most interested me in recent years - the era of the birth of Christianity...

The taste for such literature was instilled in me by my teacher, whom I followed to these countries of the Christian East, Father Michel van Esbroeck.

RJ: Does the concept of “alien culture” exist for you? Where are the boundaries? How is your personal map of cultures built?

V.L.: When you feel something Christian, it immediately begins to be perceived as native, and even language barriers are immediately sharply reduced, especially psychological ones. And this despite all my medieval anti-ecumenism: even in heretical communities, the culture usually remains native. The only exception (for me) is the West during the times of scholasticism and later, but even then it is something adjacent to Christianity: not native, but cousin. In the same way, all other traditions of Judeo-Christian root are perceived as “cousins” - Judaic (Talmudic Judaism, Karaiteism, Samaritanism, Falasha, as well as numerous dead traditions), Mandaean, Manichaean, Muslim... The next stage of remoteness is this " alien", on which the imprint of "ours" is strongly felt, that is, either the influence of Judeo-Christian traditions (as, for example, in the Zoroastrian culture of Sasanian Iran), or, conversely, a source of influence on "ours" (as, for example, in the civilizations of Ugarit or Babylonia)... And only then, somewhere far away, in India, China and Japan, or, conversely, among the tribes of black Africa, something completely alien begins. However, even this “alien” interacts with “ours” and must therefore be taken into account. Thus, Christianity in India interacted with the Hindu environment, in China with the Buddhist environment (for some reason, with the Buddhist and not the Confucian environment), and in Ethiopia with the cultures of various Negroid tribes. The cultural unity of the Christian world therefore turns out to be the key, if not quite to everything, then to almost the entire diversity of national cultures. International languages ​​common in the Christian world also help with this: Western Latin had several analogues in the Christian East, in addition to Greek. This is, first of all, Syriac, which in the second Christian millennium was supplanted by Arabic, and the region of distribution of Arabic became much wider, as well as Sogdian (in Central and Central Asia) and ancient Ethiopian, Ge'ez, in the multi-ethnic Ethiopian Empire. Of course, our Church Slavonic is also one of the main international languages ​​of Christians.

When dealing with any text, with any legend, with any liturgical sequences and even theological ideas, it is always necessary to keep in mind that their life was rarely limited to any small region of the Christian world (even if such a thing happened, then we can never believe it without checking), and therefore the study of their history should always be intercultural. We need to imagine all the boundaries that the development trajectory of the object of our research crossed. These are borders of all kinds - from differences in mentalities to differences in languages ​​and even just graphic systems.

For example, how much confusion arose within the Slavic world during simple translations of Slavic texts from one writing system to another - from Glagolitic to Cyrillic. Of these, the most common is the confusion of the numbers “2” and “3”, conveyed in both alphabets by the same letter “vedi”. Therefore, when reading “2” in the most ancient Slavic Cyrillic texts, always think: maybe it’s “3”?

RJ: What approaches would you propose to solve the difficult problem of translation and the history of texts?

V.L.: A particular but very important aspect of these problems is the need to imagine not only the languages ​​in which the texts of interest to us were translated, but also the writing systems themselves. One must, for example, always be prepared for the fact that in medieval Arabic manuscripts dots may be arbitrarily placed to indicate consonant differences (which dramatically changes the meaning of the word), or that, for example, in Ge'ez one cannot rely on grapheme differences for syllables containing "y" "and containing "d"... These are typical mistakes of medieval scribes, and sometimes of medieval translators. Without understanding this, it is impossible to understand the translated text, since the very first stage of understanding the translated text is at least an approximate reconstruction of the original. It often happens that several stages of such reconstruction are required. For example, situations are typical when, from a Georgian translation, it is necessary to reconstruct its Arabic-Christian original (lost) in order to thus gain an idea of ​​the Greek original of the Arabic - which would otherwise be completely impossible to get to.

In the study of the New Testament era, even worse situations are typical: we have a text, more or less complete, in one of the languages ​​of the Christian world (for example, Ethiopic, Slavic, Latin), from under it the Greek original shines through, but from under the Greek original shines through , in turn, the original is in one of the Semitic languages ​​- either Hebrew or Aramaic. The classic and most famous example is the Book of Enoch, which is quoted as Holy Scripture by the Apostle Jude in his Epistle included in the New Testament, and which is still part of the canonical books of the Ethiopian Bible. But that’s why it came completely only in Ethiopian. Ethiopic √ translation from Greek, from which fragments have come down; fragments in Syriac have also survived, also translated from Greek. More than 100 years ago, some scholars noticed that the Greek text is also the fruit of a translation, and precisely from one of the two Semitic languages ​​common among the Jews of the New Testament era. But other scholars denied this, arguing that all Semitisms of Greek should be explained by the fact that it was the Greek language of the Jews. The disputes were resolved only after in 1947, among the manuscripts found near the Dead Sea (Qumran), there were quite a few fragments of the Book of Enoch in Aramaic, and in manuscripts, the approximate dating of which was √ II-I centuries. BC True, even this discovery did not resolve the question of the possible existence of a Hebrew original for this Aramaic text. The relationship between the functions of Hebrew and Aramaic in the culture of pre-Christian Judaism still remains much unclear, despite the enormous achievements of the last 50 years.

RJ: Dumb question: what is good and what is bad in translation practice? What evaluation criteria would you suggest?

V.L.: The need for various kinds of historical research to simultaneously get into the skin of a translator - and even usually not one, but many translators - completely discouraged me from translating myself. Apparently, this is similar to how a parodist can no longer become a poet, although he has mastered versioning.

The situation is even worse: Gerard Garitt, my teacher’s teacher in the field of the Christian East, once wrote an article about the peculiarities of translations in the Christian East, in which he cynically admitted: “it is the worst translators who are the best for us.” Indeed, when you can suspect a translation in a text, but only of very high quality, then you give up: you lose the opportunity to distinguish it from the original and, therefore, find out in what language and in what environment the text being studied originally appeared, √ unless you will be lucky and you will come across a direct indication in some source. But more often than not, there are no such indications, and as a result, we still don’t know, for example, in what language - Greek or Syriac - the beautiful “Odes of Solomon” were created... That’s why I don’t like good translators. I love only the not very good ones, but I really love the bad and very bad ones.

RJ: ??? What do you do with the bad ones? Is there a contradiction here? After all, we talked about the fact that culture then pays a long and expensive price for the “marriage” of a translator?

V.L.: Fortunately, most medieval translators, like most translators in general, are among those whom I love. After them, there are always undigested... that is, untranslated pieces of the original. Digging into such pieces is the most interesting thing. I’ll tell you about one of these pieces, which was the fattest among the ones I personally got.

This is the so-called “Thessalonica Legend” - a legendary hagiographic biography of the inventor of Slavic writing, Cyril, in which there is no place for Methodius at all, and Cyril himself turns out to be a Syrian who heard the call to go to the Slavs in Alexandria. The traditional dating of the text is the 12th century, but it was given by Slavists who did not take into account either the Syrians, or Alexandria, or other church-historical circumstances mentioned in the legend. Those few Slavists (I'm afraid there were no more than two) who tried to take these circumstances into account came to the idea of ​​reflecting some events of the 7th century in the legend. For me, unlike the Slavists, the Syrians and Alexandria were a constant mental habitat, and it immediately seemed to me that the legend really “fit” into the historical context of the 7th century. In addition, I immediately remembered the hypothesis of Vaillant and Jacobson about the Syriac origin of the first Slavic alphabet, although not all the arguments underlying this hypothesis ultimately turned out to be convincing for me.

This prompted me to come up with a hooligan way of resolving a textual difficulty in the Legend that had defied the efforts of scholars for a hundred and fifty years. In the text of the Legend there is a small fragment, a few words long, consisting of complete gobbledygook, but presented, nevertheless, in four manuscripts without large deviations in the graphics. Attempts to read it based on Greek and all Slavic languages ​​have long been recognized as unsuccessful. It occurred to me that it should be read in Syriac. I was able to do this thanks to the fact that I had just such a dictionary at hand, which gave the necessary meaning of the main word in this entire phrase - a rare and special word, which the Slavic translator, who replaced the translation with transliteration, did not know. Regarding my knowledge of Syriac, I did not delude myself (I am not a philologist, and I do not have professional knowledge of any language, not even Slavic) and therefore immediately requested a consultation with the best expert in Syriac texts in the world, who is familiar de visu with almost all Syriac manuscripts in world, √ Sebastian Brock of Oxford. Brock suggested some important clarifications and supported the idea itself. After that, there was no need to be afraid to make reports and publish an article...

The reconstructed fragment of the Thessalonica legend now looks like this: oppressed by the seeming impossibility of learning the inconceivable Slavic language, Cyril leaves the church in Thessalonica, and then a raven sitting on the church drops on him a bunch of sharpened reed feathers for writing (this “bunch of sharpened reed feathers” as times and was designated by the same term, in one word). Kirill puts a bunch of feathers in his bosom, and they immediately enter his body. After this, Kirill forgets Greek and begins to speak Slavic fluently, and the number of letters of the Slavic alphabet he subsequently invented corresponds to the number of feathers in the bunch.

RJ: Your linguistic interpretations are sometimes revolutionary. At the very least, they change entire established layers of interpretations. What is the reaction of your colleagues?

V.L.: The scientific community of Slavists accepted my linguistic argumentation: it is now included in the Cyril and Methodius Encyclopedia and other literature published in Bulgaria and here, √ but they still refuse to listen to historical arguments √ historical-church and historical- literary: my historical constructions regarding the Monothelite Syrian mission to the Slavs in the 7th century, as well as the belonging of the Thessalonica legend to the powerful stream of Syrian apocalyptic literature of the 8th century, although not refuted, are not accepted either. Honestly speaking, I am waiting for one young man, who already knows Syriac and other eastern languages, to become, as he plans to, a specialist in the field of ancient Slavic philology, √ and then he will show!.. The approximate contours of this task are already visible: highlight from the editions of the Cyril and Methodius era, a layer of ancient texts (usually, of course, still translated from Greek, and not from Syriac), where the rules of translation were typical specifically for the Syrian environment (we have an example of translations from Greek into Ethiopian carried out Syrians, so there is something to compare with); I strongly suspect that the oldest form of the Glagolitic alphabet itself corresponded to the needs of precisely such a √ Syriac, and not a Byzantine √ translation from Greek. But I myself will never be able to understand this, since this is real philology, and my specialty is the history of ideas.