Origen update

A couple of years ago I commissioned a translation of Origen’s Homilies on Ezekiel.  This ground away between 2009-2010, and then stopped.  The fault, in truth, was mine, in that I diverted the translator onto Philip of Side, or so the emails show. 

The problem now is to work out what was, and was not done.  What I’m doing is going through all the emails and all the files and looking at date stamps on the latter.

It’s already becoming clear that a very great deal was done.  All of the Latin material — 1 preface, 14 homilies — were translated, and they were all revised after comment from me.  Homilies 8-14 were revised again after that in early 2010 — I haven’t found out why, yet — and later still, homilies 1-6 were revised and compared with the Scheck translation that came out while it was in progress.  Homily 7 seems to have missed out, but I may find different later.  I also need to check the status of the Latin text for each homily.

I haven’t worked out the status on the Greek fragments.  One last fragment, from the Codex Marchialinus, has not been done at all; but the translator was working on that recently, and I have just emailed him a prompt.

Until I know precisely what the situation is, we can’t go forward; but I am actually rather encouraged to find that things are much nearer to completion than I had thought.

I’m going to compile a set of files with the latest revisions, and a statement in a Word document, for each portion of the book, of where it is, what has been done, and what needs to be done.  Once I have this, I can work out what needs to be done, and what I can do to make it happen. 

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