After about two years and four months of diligence, the first draft of the translation of Euthymius Zigabenus’ Commentary on the Epistles of Paul is completed.

I finished the last bit of it on August 28th, and told myself that I should take at least a week off to enjoy doing something else, both to prevent burnout and to recharge my desire for this project.

Without a doubt, taking a break has been more difficult than actually working. Starting on Thursday, I have gone an entire week without doing anything productive at all and having felt each day that I was wasting my precious time. Maybe I did fall back in love with the work. Or maybe I’m proving to myself that I need some form of structure for being productive. Maybe both.

In any case, I’m planning on going back to the beginning, to the Commentary on Galatians with which I started, and beginning to correct my translation sometime within the next five days. Either on Saturday or on Monday.

A friend of mine who is doing a PhD in Classics was kind enough to provide me with a list of resources so that I could improve my understanding of Greek grammar, because I know I will struggle with the difficult parts of the Greek that I did not know how to deal with the first time through. I might start reading through some of those in advance, but I think I might need to use them as I re-encounter those hard sentences one at a time. If this phase of editing is successful, I think my Greek will improve drastically, something I am very excited about.

I might share a portion of the translation at some point, but I have hesitated to do so because I know that the English in most places is not smooth. I would go back and read some things to my wife to address something that she had said to me only to struggle to get her to understand what it was that Euthymius was saying because the translation was too literal or because there were certain words or phrases that I was unsure how to translate properly.

If you have been following this blog for any length of time, understand that any large project that is worth doing can only be done one small chunk at a time, day by day. I never thought that I would have finished this whole thing, but these kinds of surprises are always welcome.

For fun, have a look at my Translation Progress Report and see the 100% at the top. And also navigate to the second page called “Daily Details” and look at the graph called “Days Ahead of Schedule” to see the two huge increases in productivity: the first during 1st and 2nd Corinthians and the second from the end of 1st Timothy to near the end of Hebrews when I again slowed down. It looks like I went almost a whole year between these to periods of high productivity where I lacked motivation to do more than was required each day, but I’m proud of my perseverance. I did not give up and I saw this thing through to the end.

On to the next phase. My next post will probably be a progress report on how the editing is going. I do need to figure out a way to track my progress on editing, just like I have had with my translation. I will be working on that soon.