This morning, after 110 days, I finished translating Euthymius Zigabenus’ Commentary on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans. I am now 21% finished the entire Commentary on the Epistles.

See my Translation Progress Report for a more detailed and interactive look at my progress.

I must note that this translation is just the first rough draft. There are very many places where the Greek was too difficult for me to decipher completely on my own, or where the English rendition needs to be adjusted, or where Nikiforos Kalogeras has added detailed information in footnotes that I have yet to translate. All of these will be addressed at a later date.

My main goal at the moment is to continue the initial translation and to finish the entire Commentary on the Epistles, getting it to the same point that the Epistles to the Galatians and Romans are at currently. The editing process is slowly being carried out with the help of a dear friend of mine, but progress on that front is very slow. When I finish the first translation of the entire commentary, then I will begin tackling all of the points in the paragraph above on a daily basis. It will probably involve taking a deep dive into the intricacies of Greek grammar, which would benefit me tremendously right now during the daily grind, but I just do not have the time to do that currently.

Tomorrow morning I will begin working on the Commentary on the 1st Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians. Now that my daily quota is 200 words per day, the translation schedule says that it will take approximately 213 days to complete that commentary.

But let me run some numbers to get a more accurate Estimated Completion Date.

Since I changed my daily quota from 400 to 200 words, my average daily output has been 273 words. (Removing weekends from the average, thinking that they skew the number too high because I have more time to translate then, and also removing outliers, such as days when I translated no words and also today, when I translated only the 94 words that were remaining of Romans, I still end up with an average of 264 words.) If we conservatively round down the average daily output to 250 and take into consideration that I am already 22 days ahead of schedule, it should take 170 days to translate 42,413 words, which brings me to March 28, 2023 instead of May 10th.

I am very happy and motivated to be doing this. Sometime in the future, if I can finish editing certain parts of the translation, I would like to begin regularly sharing snippets of Euthymius’ Commentary on the Epistles so that people can actually see some of the fruits of my labour, and so I that I can gradually whet people’s appetite for the published book. That final product is a very distant goal, but I choose to keep it in my sight so that I can stay as motivated as I was when I first started this project.