Old Church Slavonic translations

The article draws attention to two long scholia by Severus of Antioch, Severus of Antioch, identified in Constantin Preslavski’s Didactic Gospel, which, however, did not refer to his name. The first one, a fragment from 77th Cathedral Homily of Severus, forms the second half of the exegetical part of Sermon 3. The other one, an excerpt from the 89th Cathedral Homily, which also contains two fragments by Gregory of Nyssa, constitutes a significant part of the Exegesis Section in Sermon 35. It appears in Sermon 35 as part of the Greek original, the catena on Luke CPG C130.1, which Constantine used when composing the sermons on the Gospel of Luke. The fragment in Sermon 3 is not part of the main Greek source of Constantine used to explain the passages from Matthew’s Gospel. It was borrowed from catena on Matthew C110.4, which was not used as a source anywhere else in the Didactic Gospel and was probably added later by an unknown author rather than Constantine himself. Nevertheless, the name of Severus, who was explicitly named as the author of the scholium in C110.4, was omitted in the Didactic Gospel, most likely because he was considered a heretical author in 10th century Bulgaria.

The article analyses the translation correlates of ἀρετη, πολιτεία and φιλοσοφία in Constantine of Preslav’s Didactic Gospel. Their contextual meanings are systemised together with their Old Bulgarian transponents. Other Greek words that are translated by the same slavic transponents are analysed and the data are compared to the information in the major palaeoslavic dictionaries. The observations reveal that φιλοσοφία and ἀρετη are rendered by a wide range of lexemes whose array rivals that in far more voluminous Old Bulgarian corpora. It can be shown that the choice of synonyms for the three polysemous Greek nouns is not arbitrary but consistent with the meaning in a specific context. It appears that there is a tendency towards rendering each meaning of a Greek word by one particular Slavic word, i.e. a tendency to transform semantic differentiation in the source language into lexical differentiation in the target language. There is also a rather clearly noticeable semantic differentiation between the synonymous lexemes житиѥ and жиꙁнь and it is motivated not by the translated Greek words but by their contextual meanings, in which житиѥ refers more often to the earthly life whereas жиꙁнь means the eternal life.

No Horologion (“Book of the Hours”) has survived in the Old Church Slavonic corpus. Since early Russian sources, however, tend to retain South Slavic liturgical traditions, the authors attempt to reconstruct such a book for daily prayer on the basis of Russian manuscripts from the 13th–14th centuries. A key factor in the reconstruction are the so-called kata stichon hymns, an archaic genre of Byzantine hymnography used for night prayer. The authors analyze the text and meter of these hymns, including one hymn originally composed in Slavonic in imitation of the Byzantine genre, and argue that the later Russian sources reflect an Horologion translated in Bulgaria in the late 9th or early 10th century.