July 3rd, 2009 by Roger Pearse
We all know that textbooks are often best in searchable PDF form. But yesterday I came across a case where they were not. I wanted a French grammar, so that I can brush up on stuff for Agapius. I found a bootleg PDF, thereby saving myself $25. But… I found that what I wanted to do was read the thing in bed, just a bit at a time, skip pages, and generally absorb interesting stuff by osmosis. I needed a book, in short.
So, yes, I went out and bought one. It was the only way!
Worth remembering, when we talk about the death of the book. Only some books will die.
July 2nd, 2009 by Roger Pearse
An email from the British Library EThOS service popped into my inbox a couple of days ago. It told me that a PDF of a PhD thesis was now available online for free download. I’d “placed an order” (free) for this some time back, and here it was.
The thesis was The indica of ctesias of cnidus : text (incl. MSS monacensis gr. 287 and oxoniensis, holkham gr. 110), translation and commentary by Stavros Solomou, London 2007. This link should find it. The quality is excellent - far better than the scans at the Bibliotheque Nationale Francais.
It would help if the site gave permalinks to theses. Likewise, when an order is available, a link to the thesis details would help.
But I’m still dead impressed. Whoever could have accessed something like this, before EThOS came along? I have some slack time today; I would never have hunted this out, but now… here it is. I get to read it, the author gets read, everyone benefits.
Well done the British Library.
The thesis itself is of considerable interest. The Indica of Ctesias was used widely in ancient times, until John Tzetzes; and then suddenly is no longer mentioned. This leads us to suppose that the last copy or copies perished in the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the renegade army originally hired for the Fourth Crusade.
An epitome exists in Photius. But the author has obtained two additional unpublished mss, and edited these also.
July 2nd, 2009 by Roger Pearse
I’m now looking at including the original text in any printed version of Origen on Ezechiel. We’re using the edition by W. Baehrens, published in the GCS 30 (1921) *, as reprinted in the Sources Chretiennes edition.
According to Wikipedia, Baehrens died in 1929, which is more than 70 years ago and so makes his work out of copyright in the EU (including Germany). The US copyright position is less clear, but I doubt anyone will care, once it is out of copyright in its ‘home’ country.
So it looks as if I can just use this.
I do wish, tho, that I could actually obtain a copy of Baehrens’ edition!
* 30 Origenes Werke VII. Homilien zum Hexateuch (1. Aufl. 1921: W. A. Baehrens)
July 1st, 2009 by Roger Pearse
Papyrologist Roger Bagnall has a book out in September, in which he looks again at the physical books and papyri discovered in Egypt and generally has the drains up on the dates of them. I only hope it isn’t a bit of revisionism; but I don’t get that sense from the little that I know.
Much of the established knowledge on this subject was done in some really rather splendid articles by T.C.Skeat, who did not seem to share the fear of numbers and statistics endemic in the humanities and consequently produced quite a lot of hard data. But much of this was now a long time ago, and a new take on it would be interesting. Not that I will ever see the book, I suspect, being offline; but such a study ought to be interesting.
Thanks to What’s new in Papyrology for the tip, and more details. The PDF link to chapter 1 does not seem to work, tho.
July 1st, 2009 by Roger Pearse
After sleeping on the problem, I’ve decided to continue with the translation of Origen’s Homilies on Ezechiel. After all, just translating and uploading three would look a little sad, I think. If my translator is willing to continue, then it will go ahead. The only difference is that it will be much more difficult for me to sell any copies of a printed edition, so probably means that I just have to accept that I’ll lose the cost of this. Oh well. Fortunately I can afford it.
UPDATE: the translator has agreed to continue, and I have received the first draft of homily 3 which I will read over tomorrow night. And I’ve thought up some possible new sales approaches on printed copies to help with the costs.
June 30th, 2009 by Roger Pearse
On ScribD there is a downloadable PDF by Charles A. Sullivan full of very useful information about working with Patristic Greek, websites, tips, etc. It’s here.
Thanks to Robert Bedrosian for pointing out that a search for “patristics” and “syriac” will produce results of considerable interest. The same is true for “coptic”.
You have to register for a free account, and not all material is downloadable; but much is. I suspect at least some of this is less than legitimate; other material; such as the PDF above, is undoubtedly legal. I was amused to discover some material from my own websites appeared, reformatted, as well (which is all to the good, of course).
June 30th, 2009 by Roger Pearse
Quite by accident I today learn of another projected translation of Origen’s Homilies on Ezechiel. It’s due to appear in January 2010 as part of the Ancient Christian Writers series, and translated by Thomas Scheck, who has translated several other volumes of Origen’s homilies. The Amazon advert is here.
Frankly this is a nuisance and a half. We’ll probably beat that deadline; but who needs two competing translations? More to the point, is it a sensible thing to do with my money?
Not sure what to do now.
UPDATE: I’ve written to Dr Scheck to ask the status of his work; but from his home page it appears to be complete.
I’ve done some calculations. The whole lot is about 200 pages of Latin in the SC edition, at $10 per page is $2,000. Of this, about a quarter is done and indeed paid for. So we’re talking about a further $1,500.
Perhaps the answer is to go upmarket, and add a Latin text as well as a translation.
June 30th, 2009 by Roger Pearse
This homily now is translated and paid for, so we’re really making excellent progress. 12 more homilies to go!
June 27th, 2009 by Roger Pearse
I’d very much like to know more about the astonishing revival of monasticism that has taken place among the Copts in modern Egypt. A central figure is the mysterious Fr. Matta al-Maskeen (various spellings seem to be around).
Quite by chance I’ve stumbled across a digest of translated newspaper articles on him here. Sadly you have to be a subscriber to access the articles, but the summaries alone are interesting. The site itself says that
We publish Arab-West Report, an independent weekly electronic magazine. It is dedicated to fostering understanding of the Arab World. We do this partly through summary translations of Arabic newspaper articles into English…
Guys… you’ll foster understanding better if you make it possible for people other than specialists to read the articles! You need free content, really you do. Make the current year and last year subscription only, and let everyone read before then.
Back to Fr. Matta. I think there may be a book or two about this renewal by John H. Watson, but I haven’t seen any of them.
The search in Google on “matta al-maskeen monks” brings back such interesting results. I find there is a Coptic forum here, where the merits (and otherwise) of Fr. Matta are hotly debated.
June 27th, 2009 by Roger Pearse
Well that was a good day’s work; starting late morning, continuing this afternoon with a couple of breaks, and finishing now — I’ve translated the remainder of Agapius, some 38 pages. The first draft of the whole work is done! Frankly I am delighted.
Thankfully I had scanned the page images before I began, presumably whenever I scanned the last chunk. Then I marked up the pages for scanning, corrected the OCR, and got a French text in an RTF file. Then I ran it through a programme that split it into sentences. I took the output and ran it through the machine translator. Then input both the French and the English into another tool to interleave automatically the French and English sentences. From there on, it was just a task of working through the file, making the English version correct, and removing the French as I did so. I suppose it took, what, seven hours? Hmm… that’s longer than I thought.
Not bad on a day when the outside temperature hit over 27C.
I’m done for today, now; the days when I could work to midnight on Friday and Saturday in order to work on the website are sadly behind me.
The next stage, when I get some time, is to go through these files, add page numbers, correct awkwardnesses, check things, and so on. That may be a couple of days work. But we’re getting close to a free, online English version of Agapius!
