Biblicalia has posted chapters 7-15 of St. Clement of Rome’s First Letter to the Corinthians. And the critics smirk at stories of the rapid translation of the Septuagint. Imagine seventy Kevins working full-time at the project.
4 thoughts on “Lay Claim to More Clement”
Comments are closed.
Thanks Mike! I intend to finish the whole thing within the week.
Part of the quick pace is certainly due to the extraordinary BibleWorks program, which makes it so much easier to look things up in the various lexicons rather than having all those huge books scattered about, which is how I have always translated in the past. The morphological tagging is also very, very helpful.
Overall, though, I was feeling a real “use it or lose it” sense of lameness creeping over me. I’m intending to alternate translation work, one Greek, one Hebrew, one Latin, continually now.
The Latin I have in mind is a work that I started on years ago and never finished due to the messy textual issues: St Victorinus of Petavium’s commentary to the Apocalypse. Jerome “edited” the work, rewriting substantial portions, eliminating all chiliasm or hints thereof. Fortunately we have both his reworked edition and the original. That’s one of the things I ordered from the Sources Chrétiennes sale, and should be showing up soon! I’ll present translations of both, a first in English, so far as I know.
The next Greek will be, at long last, the Apostolic Constitutions. The Hebrew will of course be the Old Testament, but I intend to adapt it to reflect the Septuagint, and include all the various apocrypha.
That’s the plan, anyway! Thanks for all the support. It really makes it much more fun to do all this knowing that someone is actually reading them and appreciating them.
Thanks for the forecast, Kevin. We’ll stay tuned.
Like the weather report, you know, that forecast might not be as accurate as one intends…. The works may change, but I’m intent to keep cranking stuff out, even if not at such a pace as this. The ApCons and Victorinus were the first things I started on, years ago, and it’s a shame for them to languish so. For Hebrew, maybe I’ll start with the Psalms, because tonight’s great 1 Clement 18 chapter had a nice selection.
1 Clement is great fun. Fascinating stuff. Translations are usually too loose. I’m trying to be consistent in using the same English where the same Greek terms recur. Thus you’ll be able to trace the theme of “humble-mindedness” (tapeinophroneō) through all the chapters I’ve got up already, obviously aimed at the arrogant young men who’ve taken over at Corinth. Others translate it variously, which is simply lame on their part. There’s no excuse for obscuring the main point of so much of the original writer’s work. Paragraph to paragraph are various key words which Clement took and spun off whole sections with, still keeping to the general theme. I’m trying to keep these connections recognizable, as well.
Kevin said:
“hus you’ll be able to trace the theme of “humble-mindedness” (tapeinophroneō) through all the chapters I’ve got up already, obviously aimed at the arrogant young men who’ve taken over at Corinth. Others translate it variously, which is simply lame on their part. There’s no excuse for obscuring the main point of so much of the original writer’s work.”
Yeah, I hate that, too. It’s really nasty when someone’s written a poem, and both the thought and the imagery get obscured.