After 99 days of translating, I have finished the Commentary on the 2nd Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians. Next up is Euthymius Zigabenus’ Commentary on Ephesians. But this milestone in the translation also marks a special point in the project.

Nikiforos Kalogeras‘ edition is split into two volumes: the first is comprised of the Epistles to Romans, 1st Corinthians, 2nd Corinthians, and Galatians, and the second is comprised of all of St. Paul’s other epistles and the Universal Epistles (see here for more information on those epistles and how they relate to this project). Since I have now completed all four of those named commentaries above, I have essentially completed the first volume of Kalogeras’ work, meaning I have completed half the work. In terms of word count, I am already more than 56% done the entire work, but this milestone made me consider how I want to move forward.

Since I too plan to publish this work in two volumes, both to make each volume densely packed with information and to reduce the cost of purchasing the entire work for readers, I wondered if I should include a daily or weekly editting regimen in addition to my daily translation from now instead of waiting until the whole work is translated.

A number of factors influenced my desire to begin doing this. For starters, I finally researched in the right places to discern that Nikiforos Kalogeras’ footnotes has Migne‘s PG (Patrologia Graeca) as their source, that is, when quoting from pages and volumes of St. John Chrysostom or Oecumenius, for example, he is quoting from Migne’s PG. To this day, when there is a footnote in Kalogeras’ edition that is either long or has a cited quote, I just put a footnote at the bottom of the page and highlight it red, saying “See footnote of Kalogeras,” effectively leaving the addition/translation of the footnotes until the editing phase. But now that I know the source, I can begin translating them and adding them into my own work.

Another reason that made me want to begin editing was so that I could introduce a new and fresh activity to this project. Doing the same routine day in and day out helps establish a sustainable level productivity which is invaluable when engaging in such a large project, but it can get tiring and monotonous doing the same thing all the time. Starting the editing process will give me new motivation and will allow me to mark my progress not only through the number of words I translate, but also through how many pages I edit. I am a numbers man, and having a quantifiable “progress bar” gamifies this project for me and gives me a mental reward for going above and beyond the daily quota. For instance, as of today, I am 99 days ahead of schedule because I continually translate over the daily quote. Hitting 100 days has been a goal of mine for a long time. And I have also started keeping track of how many words per minute I translate each day, both because it pushes me to translate faster and more efficiently and because I want to have a rough guide for gauging how long it will take to translate other works in the future before I begin them. (These statistics can be found on my Translation Progress Report.)

But the glaring issue with starting to edit is that, besides the footnotes of Kalogeras and the tweaking of the English to make it sound more idiomatic, the entire editting phase is going to be devoted to struggling with difficult Greek that I did not have the knowledge/skill to render into English when I first encountered it. My hope is that when I return to Galatians, since it was the first commentary I translated, I will see that it was just my “ring rust” that kept me from translating certain things, but even if that entire single commentary were made into perfect English from the Greek, the fact that I still struggle to this day with many difficult phrases/clauses in the Greek causes me some concern.

I spoke to a friend of mine about this and he advised me not to begin editing yet so that the struggle with the Greek does not dissuade me from continuing my translation. Right now, the daily grind is enjoyable because I am blissfully unaware of just how unequipped I am to deal with the really difficult passages that I just highlighted yellow and ignored for the time being. Perhaps I will need to take a deep dive into A Greek Grammar for Colleges by Herbert Weir Smyth and learn all the nuances that I never bothered to learn in university. Part of my would love to do that, but the lazy part of me is not so enthused. Maybe it will be for the best though.

I have lots more to say about that last point, but I will save it for another post. For now though, I will continue with the translation only and leave the editing for later.