I have come full circle again in my progress towards completing a translation of Euthymius Zigabenus’ Commentary on the Epistles of Paul. As mentioned in this post and in the About page, I began this project on Wednesday of the sixth week of Great Lent. It is once again Wednesday of the sixth week, which marks two years since the beginning of this journey.

Critical Edition

In constructing a critical edition, one must first locate all the witnesses (manuscripts), which I’ve nearly done. There are 8 manuscripts which contain Euthymius Zigabenus’ Commentary on the Epistles of Paul, and I have seven of them. The last of them is in Russia, but I cannot purchase the digitization of it because of the sanctions against Russia at this time. Until such sanctions are dropped, I will not be able to acquire that last one.

In regards to indexing the manuscripts that I have, all have been completely indexed, except for one. You can find them in the table of contents here. I began going through the water-damaged Vat. gr. 636, but I stopped at some point because of the difficulty of working with it and because I had other more pressing things to do with my time. At some point I will return to it and finish it off.

Collating the manuscripts was my main priority at the very beginning of this work, but then I decided to switch to translating the commentary instead. Comparing all the manuscripts line by line is going to be very difficult because how long this complete work is, so I plan on shelving this portion of the project for now. Maybe after I publish this book I will return to this and create a second edition with the complete critical edition of this work alongside the English translation. What can I say? I have my dreams.

Translation

As of today I have completed 82.68% of the translation of the entire commentary and 48.35% of the commentary on the 2nd Epistle of Paul to Timothy. You can view the Translation Progress Report for a detailed breakdown of the journey towards completion. In first page of the report, it has an approximate finish date for each commentary. But, because I made changes to how I was calculating this date multiple times, I bastardized the dates that are in the past. They make no sense. Looking into the future, though, is fairly accurate. If I continue at the pace that I’ve set for myself, I should be finished the first draft by the end of November.

Editing will come next, as I have written about a few times already. It will be a long and difficult task to do the following necessary things: work through the Greek that was too difficult for me the first time through, translate all the footnotes of Nikiforos Kalogeras from his 1887 edition, accurately cite all the works that are referenced in the footnotes in Migne‘s Patrologia Grecae (PG), and rework the literal English translation into one that flows nicely yet retains the meaning of the original Greek. Though the editing will be difficult, I look forward to starting it.

Nikiforos Kalogeras

I finished translating the biography of Nikiforos Kalogeras about a year and a half ago, but I wanted someone to help me edit it. Just this week I made the decision to just go at it alone. With this in mind, I laid out a plan where I would begin on July 1st by editing just one paragraph of the English each day until the biography is completed. This does two things for me: 1) it allows me to tackle just one small portion of text without feeling a need to rush, giving me ample time to delve into all the complexities and obscurities of the artificially difficult Katharevousa and 2) it will give me a foretaste of what the editing of the translation of the actual commentary will be like.

Long ago I finished digitally acquiring all three oil paintings of Nikiforos Kalogeras. I have permission to reproduce the paintings from Rizarios school and from the Φιλεκπαιδευτική Εταιρεία. The permission for the one from the University of Athens has not been officially given to me from the Office of the Rector, but I think I can get away with it. The gentleman from the Office of the Rector told me that a specific professor is in charge of granting permission (no one will be named), and when I asked that professor for permission, he gave it to me, but then he went on to say that he isn’t the one to give permission. This is a circle that leads nowhere, but I figure that if the Office of the Rector says that the professor is in charge, and that professor gave me a certain level of permission, then I have permission. At this point, I no longer care to battle with them; I will just take this permission and go with it.

In addition to the three paintings above, I found a fourth painting which looks like a wall fresco, due to the cracking of the paint, and it is located at the Monastery of Xenophontos where Nikiforos Kalogeras was tonsured a monk. I have an image of it, but not a high resolution one. In order to get a high resolution image, I would most likely need to go to Mount Athos and take a picture myself. That is not in my immediate plan, so I will have to just be satisfied with what I have. One thing that caught my eye this week was that there was writing on this painting, which I had not noticed before. I have to put it in Photoshop and see if I can make the inscriptions more legible. More on that if I manage to succeed.

Book Press and Future projects

As I mentioned in this post, I have been wanting to start up my own small book press and self-publish the translation of Euthymius Zigabenus’ Commentary on the Epistles of Paul. As I approach the completion of the first draft of the translation, I think about this entrepreneurial move more and more. What will I name the press? What will the logo be? What kind of marketing strategies will I employ? What software will I use to keep track of all the customers, suppliers, costs, revenue, etc.? Which supplier will I choose to actually create the physical books? All these considerations have been in my mind for months now.

But a book press has to have more than one product. In the same post as above, I also mentioned other projects that I could translate and publish. Euthymius Zigabenus’ Commentary on the Four Gospels is the main one that I have had in my sights for over a year; it was the one that I wanted to start with. His Commentary on the Psalms is also intriguing, but it has already been translated into English and into Modern Greek (see the same post above for links to those translations).

What I just began considering recently, though, is that since I had already been looking at the Commentary on the Universal Epistles (see here for a post that details how this work could not have been written by Euthymius), I could just translate that work into English like I had originally envisioned. But this time, it would not be included in the volume(s) associated with this present work, but rather in it’s own separate volume with it’s own title.

This sudden realization prompted me to begin researching all of the manuscripts where this work is extant, even in fragmentary form. Even as I write this, I’m researching the witnesses and making many notes as I learn different things about them.

My goal for this new work is this (assuming that everything goes well): First I will create a complete critical edition of the Commentary on the Universal Epistles (which I may just rename to Catholic Epistles, since this is what the whole world knows them as), thereby a) consolidating all of the known manuscripts into a single edited version and b) giving me the exceptional opportunity to practice reading Greek miniscule on a work that is significantly smaller than the project I am currently working on.

I have already set deadlines for when I need to have all the manuscripts collected and for when I should start collating them and developing the critical apparatus.

There is a lot to say about my preparation for creating this new critical edition, but since it does not pertain to the Commentary on the Epistles of Paul, I will refrain for now. What I will say is that my plan is to keep translating in the mornings and to develop the critical apparatus bit by bit at night or on weekends during the afternoon. It will be slow going, but doing both activities in parallel will put me in the good position of having a work in progress at all times if my dream of starting this book press actually comes to fruition.

I have other ideas for future projects, but this is enough information for now.