There are 174 letters of the 6th century sophist, Procopius of Gaza. I want to create a reasonably reliable translation for my own use, which I will put online in case anybody else would find it useful. It won’t be of academic standard, but rather a tool.
I’ve been assembling materials for a while now. I’ve got a Word document containing an electronic Greek text. This is made up of the text from the Garzya edition, and I’ve scanned the six extra letters to Megithius, which were discovered by Amato a decade ago.
I’ve also got the Italian translation, and I’ve got DeepSeek to create an AI translation of that. I’ve also experimented a bit with Google Translate, and found that it is producing better translations of the Italian than DeepSeek.
I’ve got a PDF of the relevant volume of the Patrologia Graeca, which has a Latin translation in it. But I don’t think this will be of great use, and I won’t try to create a Word document of it.
So I’m all set.
But a bit of self-knowledge comes in here. 174 letters is quite a lot. In fact it’s overwhelming, and daunting. Experience tells me that I need to give myself a reward every so often or I will drown.
The best way to do this is to divide it up into groups of 10 letters. So I’ve created a “work” directory, and under that a directory “01”. In that I have two files, one containing the Greek for letters 1-10, the other containing the English version of the Italian. That’s a manageable amount. If I tried, I could probably finish that up in a day, if I wasn’t otherwise engaged. When I have done that chunk, I will extract the next ten letters, and so on.
Staring at two or three files and comparing them is tiring. What I will need to do, for each letter, is interleave the sentences from each file. So that’s a task still to do.
Forward!
I have considered working on translating his commentary/catena on the OT. Im may once get all of the commentaries of Oecumenius.