The editing of Euthymius Zigabenus’ Commentary on Paul’s Epistles is coming along slowly and steadily. I am about to start on Hebrews, which is the last of the commentaries that need to be looked at. As of right now I have a little over 25% of the verses already edited that need to be reworked because of issues over word choices or because the Greek posed too great a challenge the first time I revisited them. The tentative completion date for the first round of editing is July 22 of this year.

I have been meaning to write about a discovery that I made at the end of March this year, but I have been hesitant to do so until now. There is a Greek Orthodox nun, Sister Christina, that has been responsible for an unfathomable number of translations of patristic works in a very short amount of time. The online store of her works can be found here. Her publications include English translations of all of St. Theophylact‘s commentaries on the New Testament, the complete Philokalia, the complete Evergetinos, and many other things. As I was following her rate of publication at the end of 2023, I grew slightly anxious about the possibility that she would get to translating and publishing Euthymius’ Commentaries before me. Lo and behold! It happened. Here are links to the Commentaries on the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, John, and to a book containing what I have been working on, the Commentaries on Titus and Hebrews.

After finding these, I immediately called her to discuss these with her. We had a good conversation, and we discussed our respective processes for translations. The only thing that I will say about hers is that she does not do the translations herself; she rather hires other competent people to do the translations for her and then she publishes them. I found it to be quite an ingenious system, and it clearly has given the English speaking world a plethora of patristic texts that it did not previously have available. She had not been aware that I was already working on my current translation and that I had in fact finished the first draft, so she agreed not to pursue Zigabenus’ Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistles, both out of respect to me and because there were many other things in her queue to work on.

I promptly purchased these four books and decided to use her translation of Titus as a guide for the difficult parts of the Greek when I finally arrived at that commentary. The English of her publication reads very smoothly, but I found that it was almost entirely unhelpful, except for in a few spots. There were certain parts that I had no idea what the Greek was saying, and, when looking to see how the translator of the published work tackled it, I discovered that he completely omitted it. There were other instances where the translation was so idiomatic that the English did not convey the same meaning that the Greek did. In time, as I approached the end of my draft of Titus, I had unintentionally and unwittingly stopped looking at the published work for guidance. This is not to say that the translation is not useful. It has its place and is tremendously helpful for those who have no knowledge of Greek and cannot approach the original work. But my objective is to give a very faithful English rendition of the original work, and as a consequence, my English prose will probably not be as fluid and easy to read at times as this one is. I do not mean to critique Sister Christina’s publication at all. Her work is extremely valuable. I only mean to convey that her published translation(s) may be a little more idiomatic and less literal, whereas mine will be more literal and a bit harder to read at times.

As I had said in this post, I had wanted to translate Euthymius Zigabenus’ Commentary on the Four Gospels, but since Sister Christina has already finished that, there is no point in pursuing it. Whether or not the publication has the same type of idiomatic translation that at times causes the original meaning to be lost, I cannot say. It would be impossible to come to such a conclusion without first embarking on a long and arduous reading/translation of the Greek, which I think I cannot afford at this time in my life. This current project has already taken much longer than I had originally thought, and the difficulties that I am encountering in certain sections of the Greek seem to be insurmountable. If I ever get this published it might be a miracle, but I am persistent and will hope to see it through. What I do after I finish it (whatever form that happens to take), I do not know. We will see when I get there. A much deserved break I think will be needed.