Category: From my diary

Eusebius Gallicanus, Homily 12, De Pascha 1 – English translation

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Tomorrow is Easter Sunday, and as ever I celebrate Sunday by leaving the computer turned off.  At the moment I have a pile of Latin sermons before me; the homilies of Eusebius of Emesa, Eusebius of Alexandria and Eusebius Gallicanus before me.

I thought that we might celebrate Easter by translating a previously untranslated Easter homily into English.  A quick search reveals that “Eusebius Gallicanus” includes 12 Easter homilies, the first in two versions.  Here is a quick machine-translated version of the first of those.  It’s plainly just a fragment; but no matter.

1. Rejoice, O heaven, and be glad, O earth. This day has shone forth more brightly from the tomb than it ever gleamed from the sun. Let hell exult because it is broken; let it rejoice because it is visited; let it triumph because after long ages it has seen an unknown light and has drawn breath in the darkness of deep night.

O beautiful light, you who shone forth from the radiant summit of heaven, and amidst the purple streams have clothed those sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death with sudden brightness! Immediately the grating of stiff chains is loosed; the shattered bonds of the condemned have fallen; the torturers, their minds struck dumb, are astonished; at once the impious workshop trembled when it saw Christ in its very abodes.

2. “Who then,” they say, “is this terrible one, gleaming with snow-white splendour? Never has our Tartarus received such a one; never has the world vomited forth such a one into our caverns. This one is an invader, not a debtor; an exactor, not a sinner. We see a judge, not a suppliant: he comes to command, not to submit; to rescue, not to remain. Where now did the gatekeepers sleep while this warrior assailed our strongholds? If he were guilty, he would not be so proud; if any offenses darkened him, he would never scatter our Tartarus with his radiance. If he is God, why has he come? If a man, why has he presumed? If God, what is he doing in the tomb? If a man, why does he release captives? Has he perhaps made a pact with our author? Or has he attacked him and conquered him, and so crossed over into our realm? Surely he was dead, surely he was mocked. Our champion did not know what destruction this one would bring upon hell. That cross, which deceived our joys and gave birth to our losses—by wood we were enriched, by wood we are overthrown! That power, always dreaded by the peoples, perishes.”

“No living person has ever entered here; no one has ever terrified the executioners. Never in this dwelling, blinded as it is by perpetual darkness, has a pleasant light appeared. Has the sun perhaps departed from the world? But neither heaven nor the stars obey us, and yet hell is shining. We cannot defend the prison’s custody against him. We have been poorly invaded; we could not darken the light; moreover, we fear for our own destruction.”

The Latin, from CCSL 101, modifiied to restore the “v” and “j” so that it is more readable to normal people (!):

DE PASCHA, I

1. Exsulta caelum, et laetare terra. Dies iste amplius ex sepulcro radiavit, quam de sole refulsit. Ovet inferus quia resolutus est, gaudeat quia visitatus est, resultet quia ignotam lucem post saecula longa vidit et in profundae noctis caligine respiravit.

O pulchra lux quae de candido caeli fastigio promicasti, et inter fluenta purpurea sedentes in tenebris et umbra mortis subita claritate vestisti! Soluit confestim stridorem rigen­tium catenarum: dirupta cecidere vincula damnatorum, Attonitae mentis obstupuere tortores; simul impia officina contremuit, cum Christum in suis sedibus vidit.

2. “Quisnam” inquiunt “est iste terribilis et niveo splendore coruscus? Numquam noster talem excepit tartarus; numquam in nostra cavema talem evomuit mundus. Invasor iste, non debitor; exactor est, non peccator. Judicem videmus, non supplicem: venit iubere, non succumbere; eripere, non manere. Ubi iam janitores dormierunt, cum iste bellator claustra vexabat? Hic, si reus esset, superbus non esset; si eum aliqua delicta fuscarent, numquam nostros tartaros suo dissiparet fulgore. Si deus, ut quid venit? Si homo, quid praesumpsit? Si deus, quid in sepulcro facit? Si homo, qua­re captivos soluit? Numquidnam iste cum auctore nostro composuit? aut forte aggressus et ipsum vicit, et sic ad nos­tra regna transcendit? Certe mortuus erat, certe illusus erat. Proeliator noster nescivit quam hic stragem procuraret inferno. Crux illa fallens gaudia nostra, parturiens damna nostra; per lignum ditati sumus, per lignum evertimur! Perit potestas illa, semper populis formidata”.

“Nullus hic vivus intravit, nemo carnifices terruit. Numquam in hac habitatione et nigra semper caligine caecata, jucundum lumen apparuit. Aut forte sol de mundo migravit? Sed nec caelum nobis astraque parent*, et tamen inferus lucet. Defen­dere contra ipsum carceris nostri custodiam non valemus. Male intrati sumus, lumen obtenebrare nequiuimus, insuper et de nostro interitu formidamus”.

Happy Easter!

The Latin sermons of Eusebius of Emesa: excerpts from Buytaert’s introduction

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Yesterday I started to read the introduction to E.M. Buytaert, Eusèbe d’Émèse: discours conservés en latin : textes en partie inédits, tome premier: La collection de Troyes (discours 1-17), Louvan (1953).  After a bit I stopped and banged the French into Google Translate.  Here’s some bits.

First he gives a few words about Eusebius of Emesa himself:

Eusebius of Emesa was born around 300 AD in Edessa, Mesopotamia. His parents, wealthy Christians, introduced him to the Bible and Greek literature. Shortly after the Council of Nicaea, the young man left for Palestine; There he enriched his scriptural knowledge under the tutelage of Patrophilus of Scythopolis and Eusebius of Caesarea. Around 330, he arrived in Antioch, where he was admitted among the confidants of Patriarch Euphronius. The latter wished to incorporate the young scholar into his clergy, but Eusebius, seized by panic, fled to Alexandria, where he devoted himself to philosophical matters.

Returning to the Syrian metropolis under Euphronius’ successor around 335, he likely taught Holy Scripture and became a preacher. Having noticed his administrative qualities, the Eusebians chose him at the Council of the Encaenia (341) to replace Saint Athanasius, who had been deposed, and Pistos, the overly troublesome interloper. Eusebius declined the offer, but soon after accepted the see of Emesa, a Lebanese city now called Homs. His installation was not without difficulties: the Emesenians repeatedly accused him of supporting Sabellianism and dabbling in astrology. The following years are not well documented. Eusebius preached in Antioch, Beirut, and Jerusalem; he accompanied Emperor Constantius during the campaigns against the Persians; it cannot be proven that he attended any councils of the period.

By the spring of 359 at the latest, he had died and was buried in Antioch. Shortly after his death, his friend George of Laodicea wrote his encomium, which became the primary source for the Byzantine historians Socrates and Sozomen, to whom we owe most of our biographical details.

Now some context on the text.

To facilitate our discussion, it is helpful to list now the three principal collections which, in Latin patristics, have been associated with the name of Eusebius of Emesa.

1) The Gallican collection, commonly called the Pseudo-Eusebius of Emesa. The ten Homilies ad Monachos were the first to be published, as early as 1531; J. Gaigny, in 1547, increased the number of published pieces to 56, and A. Schott, in 1618, to 74. According to a more recent study by Dom G. Morin, the collection comprises 75 pieces: piece 39 is duplicate; then add two more Easter homilies, but remove two discourses that certainly belong to Maximus of Turin. Currently, it is believed that the collection contains a number of oratorical compositions by Faustus of Riez, but that the names of Caesarius of Arles and Eusebius of Emesa, put forward recently, must be definitively dismissed.

2) The collection of fourteen discourses, published by J. Sirmond, under the name of Eusebius of Caesarea, based on a Codex Herivaliensis and a manuscript that now belongs to the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris, MS Latin 16837. Against Sirmond and many other authors, it is now established, we believe, that these discourses are the work, not of Eusebius of Caesarea, but of Eusebius of Emesa. It should be noted that this collection has also been preserved in manuscript 266 of Charleville.

3) The collection of seventeen short works, preserved in manuscript 523 of Troyes under the name of Eusebius of Emesa. His Discourses III and IV occupy the first and second positions in the previous collection brought to light by J. Sirmond. We will say a word later about the provenance of these seventeen discourses. [2].

It is the Troyes and Sirmond collections that we are publishing here. Of the twenty-nine discourses published, the seventeen in volume one give the complete Troyes collection, the twelve in volume two, the Sirmond collection, with the exception of his Discourses I and 2, which are identical to Discourses 3 and 4 of the Troyes collection and published with it.

Footnote 2 contains a useful warning:

At one time, Latin patristics knew yet another “Emesenian” collection.  A Dominican, who remained anonymous, edited 145 homilies under the title: Divi Eusebii episcopi EMISENI homiliae de Tempore et de Sanctis, Paris, 1554. In reality, this was the work of Bruno of Segni, which can be found in Marchesi, S. Brunonis Astensis Opera, Venice, 1651, or in the PL, vol. CLXIV-CLXV. See L’Heritage litt. d’Eusébe ad’Emése, p. 98.

Then Dr B. goes into a detailed description of the manuscripts from which he intends to edit the Latin text.  Most of this will be useful only to someone intending to do likewise, so this is just a summary:

Troyes, Bibliothèque de la ville, ms. 523. 11-12th century.  From Clairvaux, where it was MS M.40, and appears as such in the 1472 catalogue.  Transferred to Troyes with many other Clairvaux MSS at the Revolution.

Charleville, Bibliothèque de la ville, ms. 266.  2nd part of the 12th century.  Mutilated at the end.  Belonged to the Norbertine monastery of Belval, where it was MS. 421.  Transferred in 1795 with 82 other MSS of Belval to Charleville municipal library.  Folios 107r-160v contain the collection of homilies attributed in 1643 by Sirmond to Eusebius of Caesarea, in the same order as in the two MSS that Sirmond used.

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. arménien 110.  12th century.  A big heavy sermonary, in two columns.  On f.468r-469r are two pieces which are attributed “By St Eusebius, bishop”.  These are two fragments of the Troyes collection item 2, De filio.

London, British Library, ms. syriaque 676 (Add. 12,164).  6th century.  Contains a florilegium, which includes three extracts of the Sirmond collection no. 11.  Lemma is “Eusebii Emeseni, ex oratione De Fide” or “same”.

Also mentioned are BNF lat. 16837, a Syriac MS in Rome, and another Armenian MS in Venice.

In our blessed days, it is easier to consult manuscripts than ever, and especially French manuscripts, thanks to the IRHT and their ARCA site, https://arca.irht.cnrs.fr/.  The search engine on this is really useful.  Search for “Charleville 266” and that’s what you get.  You no longer have to guess for whatever fanciful title the locals may have given the town archives.

On the other hand the practical French identifications of yesterday – “Charleville, Bibliothèque de la ville” – are today replaced by bored locals with useless names such as “France, Charleville-Mézières, Voyelles Media Library”.

Charleville, Bibliothèque de la ville 266 is online.  There’s a digitised microfilm at https://arca.irht.cnrs.fr/ark:/63955/md97xk81jv2b, and also a few colour images.  But at the bottom, labelled “to do”, is “complete digital copy”.  You have to give it to the French, they’re really tackling the digitisation problem with determination.

Troyes 523 is much the same – a digitised microfilm and a few scattered images: https://arca.irht.cnrs.fr/ark:/63955/md77fq97930g.

I’ve not tried to hunt down the others.

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have long wanted to do something with the sermons of Eusebius of Emesa (d. ca. 360 AD).  These exist in an ancient Latin translation, which was published back in 1953 by E. M. Buytaert.1  But I never have, simply because I have never had access to it.  It’s a great publication, a solid piece of work: but you never see anything about it.  I suppose this is because nobody takes Eusebius of Emesa seriously.  He was a quiet, old-fashioned, scholarly figure, who left little mark on the Arian controversies.

Anyway, last week I weakened, and I ordered an actual physical copy of volume 1 brand-new from Peeters in Louvain.  It’s not really that expensive – about 30 euros, plus modest postage.

This morning I had to go out and drag something round the side of the house.  When I did so, I found, behind the garden gate, a parcel.  Oh no.  For it was gently raining.

The courier had not troubled to leave a note, and no electronic communications had taken place.  Indeed I didn’t even have a delivery date.

In my own future interests, I decided to complain to the courier company.  Their “help page” was plainly designed to wear-out and baffle, rather than help.  So I wrote to the CEO, telling him the story in a nice way, and asking if he could give the delivery driver a spanking.  This afternoon I got a very nice email back from the poor girl charged with fielding complaints, who evidently got a chuckle out of my phrasing.  Apparently it had been dropped off yesterday.

But first I brought it in, nervously, and unwrapped it.  Multiple layers of too-soft cardboard.  But thankfully Peeters had shrink-wrapped the book itself in plastic, inside the packaging.  It’s fine.

Amusingly this must be *modern* shrink-wrapping, because grimy finger-prints were visible underneath it on the paper cover!

The marks are actually less visible on the real thing – the camera deceives, as we all know.

I’ve not looked inside it yet for an unexpected reason.  You see, I bought this new.  But this is no modern reproduction.  This is clearly from the original print run.  Peeters must have a stack of volumes that has sat there ever since 1953, for the last 73* years.  And, being a product of a different time, the pages are uncut!

It’s rather a privilege to have it.  But I’m sure that Dr Buytaert would be less sentimental, and tell me to get on, cut the pages and read what he had to say.

* 73 years, not 23!

  1. E.M. Buytaert, Eusèbe d’Émèse: discours conservés en latin : textes en partie inédits, 2 vols, Louvain (1953).  Archive.org, vol. 1; vol. 2. (borrowable only)[↩]

Getting bogged down in Procopius of Gaza

Posted on by Roger Pearse

When I first encountered the Italian translation by Federica Ciccolella of the letters of the sixth century sophist Procopius of Gaza, it seemed to me that it would be useful to simply run this through Google Translate, plus some AI translator, combine the two, and get a rough English version.  It wouldn’t be an academic translation, but it ought to be useful enough to stir up interest in the text in the anglophone world.

Unfortunately I’ve gradually got more and more bogged down.  As I worked, I began to feel the need for the Greek text, which I therefore obtained; and also an AI translation of that for orientation purposes.  Comparing this to the Italian indicated that the Greek ought to be consulted rather often.   Gradually the scope widened from the original, limited objective.  Really, it would have been better to start with the Greek altogether.  Instead I find myself comparing this output with that output and, inevitably, being drawn to whatever version is clearer, better English, punchier.  Which is not at all necessarily what Procopius wrote.

Worse yet, the memory loss that goes with getting older means that I have repeatedly lost my place and lost track of what I have or have not done.  I now have a large directory full of drafts, at various stages, with no clear idea of what outputs each drew upon, or the extent of my own interventions.  Being distracted by family commitments, and obliged to stop work for a week or two at various points, has not helped at all.  I’ve burned much more time than I ever intended on this marginal task.

What to do?

I think that the original objective was undoubtedly correct, and it is my own enthusiasm that has led me astray.  I think that the best thing to do is to return to that, and just ignore the Greek materials wherever I have not already done some work with them.  Likewise to prefer the Google Translate to the AI.  After all, the output from this task does not pretend to be a translation: only something to aid the reader to work with the text.  It’s bound to be a hotch-potch, but still better than the big fat nothing that we have at the moment.  But it still makes me wince.

What I must learn from this is the importance of controlling the scope of what I do.  Also I need to realise that these days I may well lose track of things in a long project.  I need to document what each portion of the text actually is, as I go.  This was never a problem in the past, when I did real translations with a clearer focus; but I think my original approach, intending something quick, is the reason why I got into difficulties.

So for  good or ill, I will stop.  I will use whatever I have already worked up, in whatever state it is.  I will add the minimal footnotes that I intended to add.  And I will throw the result over the wall, with a note explaining what it is.  The result should still be helpful to an English reader with little or no Italian, trying to get to grips with Dr Ciccolella’s work.

But it is an uncomfortable feeling, knowing that the result is not what I intended, may contain AI errors, and at bottom is misconceived.  All the same, I cannot face discarding my work and starting again, so I will just have to live with it.  The alternative seems to be to simply abandon the project.

An interesting interview with a translator

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The following 2015 article, “Interview with Translator Abdul Aziz Suraqah,” contains some interesting insights.

I recently had the honour of interviewing Sidi Abdul Aziz Suraqah, an inspiring translator, editor and educator, currently based in Toronto (Canada), who has translated some of the best available Classical Islamic text out there from Arabic to English. Moreover, he is famously known for his fantastic website and blog: Ibriz Media….

Sidra: Please could you share a bit about yourself?

Abdul Aziz : My name is Abdul Aziz Suraqah. I was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. During the golden age of Hip Hop, when I was 14 years old, I was inspired by groups like Public Enemy and KRS One to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. That led to an interest in Islam, and so after reading a translation of the Quran I embraced Islam, al-Hamdulillah.  A couple of years later I began to study Arabic and soon thereafter pursued further studies in Yemen, Mauritania, and Morocco. I currently teach at Dar al-Ma’rifah and Risalah Foundation here in Toronto, Canada. And since 2007 I’ve been translating Islamic texts full time. The name of my service is Ibriz Media. ….

Sidra: Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing?

Abdul Aziz : The most challenging thing in translating Islamic literature, for me at least, is maintaining a good intention and upholding adab in the entire process from beginning to end. It’s not always easy to translate these incredibly profound spiritual or theological works day in and day out—it’s hard to be “on” and in the moment with the texts every single day. When I experience constriction (qabd) or a mental block or setback, I’ll work on less intensive projects or even pull back for a day or two and double up when my energy returns. …

From a technical perspective, the biggest challenge is striking a balance between fidelity to the source language, i.e., the original words of the author, and readability in the target language. It’s incredibly challenging and there are several possibilities to choose from, so the first rule I try to observe is “Do no harm.”

Sidra: What are the most rewarding elements of translating a book?

Abdul Aziz : …

It’s also very touching to meet someone who says they benefitted from a book I’ve translated. Translation work is lonely and most translators don’t get to hear back from readers, so when we do hear that someone has enjoyed or benefitted from our work it makes all the efforts worthwhile, al-Hamdulillah. The best feedback I’ve received was from a friend who read The Drink of the People of Purity and saw the author Shaykh Muhammad al-Qandusi in a dream. Here is what he said:

I fell asleep reading The Drink of The People of Purity. As soon as I fell asleep, I found myself at Bab al-Futuh [a large cemetery in Fez, Morocco in which lie thousands of saints and scholars] in front of the Maqam of Sayyidna Abdul Aziz al-Dabbagh. At the Maqam, I found an old man sitting with his back resting on the outer left wall of the Maqam. I walked to the man and asked him to make du’a for my affairs. He raised his head and said, “What more is there to give you after my book?” I was puzzled and then I asked him, “Are you Shaykh Muhammad al-Qandusi?” The man replied with a very intense stare, “I am him but he is not I. He knows where I am.” I lowered my gaze and begged for du’a. He said, “Do not wait to drink until you are overcome with thirst. Drink! And always stay hydrated.” He then said “If you don’t know what I mean then ask my Translator.” After he said this, His Jalal [majesty] immediately turned into Jamal [beauty] with a radiant smile. I kissed his forehead and woke up.

Sidra: Can you give us some examples of a word or phrase that just doesn’t translate well?

Abdul Aziz : Let’s see. Taqwa comes up a lot and there doesn’t seem to be good translation of it that is accurate and a single word. You’ll see renderings such as Godfearingness (my preferred choice when it is not used in a different context), mindfulness (a nice sounding translation but still a bit opaque), God-consciousness, and even fear.

When translating Shaykh Yusuf al-Nabahani’s Wasa’il al-wusul (Muhammad: His Character and Beauty) I had to wrestle with an oft-used word pair, mudarat and mudahana. Mudarat is defined as “the sacrifice of a worldly interest in order to attain either a worldly or a religious benefit, or both together,” so after much mental wrangling I settled on the word sociability. The other word, mudahana, literally means lubricity (yeah, that’s a word). It is defined as “the sacrifice of one’s religion for the sake of attaining a worldly benefit.” (Bajuri) The late translator Muhtar Holland (Allah have mercy upon him) translated it is “fawning flattery.” That’s a sound translation, but after consultation with some teachers I decided to translate it as sycophancy.

In Arabic there are many phrases that are hard to turn around into English. Sometimes the original flow is lost in order to preserve the structure of the target language; but over the years translators develop a repertoire of maneuvers and turns of phrase that get them out of tight spots.

Sidra: Which book past or present, do you imagine was the most difficult to translate?

Abdul Aziz : No need to imagine that one! The most difficult translation by far was Shaykh Sa’id Foudah’s A Refined Explanation on the Sanusi Creed. That project cost me blood, sweat, and tears (the latter two literally!) It’s an intermediate text in classical Sunni-Ash’ari theology detailing the textual and rational proofs for the tenets of faith. What made the project so challenging was the footnotes, as Shaykh Sa’id was quoting from earlier theologians who are known to use a very tightly packed style of speech where detailed meanings are crammed into terse phrases. It’s no exaggeration to say that unpacking those into clear English was at times terrifying. This is theology after all; who wants to mistranslate something about belief in Allah and His Messengers and unknowingly mislead innocent readers? Ya Latif!

Sidra: How long does it take you to translate a book roughly? 

Abdul Aziz : It all depends on the nature of the book, the time period in which it was written, the size, etc. For a book in Arabic that is, say, 100 pages with average sized font, it can take anywhere from a month to two months to translate it provided it’s the only thing I’m working on. But that doesn’t factor in all of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into preparing a book for publication: self-edits, research, copy editing, typesetting, proofreading, etc. It usually takes 18 months or more for a book to get from A to Z and in bookstores, so when you see a translation made available at a bookstore or online, it was probably finished around two years ago.

There is more at the link, and all interesting.  This is not an academic translator, but someone doing this in the field.  “Abdul Aziz” is or was an American by birth, I should add.  His website, https://ibrizmedia.com/, is offline now, and it looks as if the domain has gone, but it is archived here.

The dream anecdote reminded me of an anecdote by Kevin Sylvan Guthrie, who translated various works of Proclus, including the Life by Marinus (online here):

This reissue of Proclus’ works came about in a strange, Providential way, Mr Emil Verch was a California miner, with no classical education, but with a deep desire to know the truth, and with abstemious impulses, and desire for knowledge of the Invisible.

One day, much to his surprise, he heard a great oration, in an unknown tongue, by a sage who appeared to him, and who was demonstrating geometrical and symbolic figures. After his great surprise was over, he insisted on knowing the sage’s name, and was told it was PROCLUS (this happened in a miner’s cabin in California’s mountain mining district, and later in the Delta Hotel in San Francisco).

As Mr Verch did not know anything about PROCLUS he went around asking about him, and ultimately, while working as engineer on a ship in New York Harbour, through the Marine Y.M.C.A, thanks to the enlightened liberality of Mr Beard who could appreciate mystic devotion even if in unfamiliar language, he came to me, and visited TEOCALLI, where I showed him what works of Proclus I happened to have, and a list of his works.

Till then I had neglected Proclus, being absorbed in Plotinus, Numenius, Pythagoras. Indeed, the ebbing of the forces of my life seemed to preclude any new interests; but Mr Verch’s insistence that I do something for PROCLUS led me to assent in principle. Encouraged by vague promises of assistance when I gave up my heart-breaking work at ALL SAINTS, during the 1924 Christmas vacation, I did my best to investigate anew a manifolding process, through which I have managed to get this much together, trusting to God to help.  [K.S.G.]

The parallel is not exact.  Indeed I fear that Guthrie may have been the victim of a prank by this Emil Verch, who amused himself at the expense of his victim.  But interesting to see people getting translators to do work for them by claiming a vision in a dream.

Back to Procopius of Gaza

Posted on by Roger Pearse

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!

A little web-archaeology of image files on the blog

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Earlier today I happened to notice that the images were not displaying on an old post.  A little investigation revealed others.  Eventually I installed a plugin to locate broken images, and got the results.

In some cases, WordPress had decided to change the how the link was handled.  The file was “somefile.JPG”, but the WordPress link was “somefile.jpg”.  This once worked; now it does not.  I dealt with this by renaming the file extension on my PC and uploading it to the server.

There were some images which had non-ascii characters in their file name.  Once these clearly worked.  But no longer.  I dealt with this by renaming as  before.

In some cases WordPress had decided, sometime, to add “-1” to the image name in the post.  Since it did not change the image file name, that broke the display.  I went through these posts and removed the “-1”.

And then there were the external images.  Links to websites now vanished.  I was able to retrieve most of these using Archive.org, and I stored them safely locally.

It was interesting to see an image from Chris Weimer’s blog, neonostalgia.com, the site on which I originally started to blog, under  the category of “Thoughts on Antiquity”.  The domain name has changed hands several times.  The author has disappeared from the web, engaged in the far better tasks of making a living and bringing up a family.  That might have been my destiny also, had a certain young lady thought differently about me, long ago.

It was interesting to find an image from J.B.Piggin’s site, also now gone.  He was the man who opened up the Vatican LIbrary, when he discovered the vast digitisation of manuscripts which was being obscured by the then wretched Vatican website.  His weekly updates of uploads brought that collection to the millions.

But worst of all, and unfixable, was one page on the 2012 discovery of a Mithraeum at Inveresk in Scotland: the Lewisvale Roman altars.  Unusually I linked all the images to the official site.  And… the site was first moved to another address, with a 301 redirect, but the images cunningly left on the old server.  That meant that Archive.org could not archive them.  Then both sites disappeared also.  Even the writer of the diary entries, conservator Pieta Greaves, had died, aged only 46.  So there is nothing to be done.

I occasionally think that I ought not to hold local copies of material, such as Mithras images.  Ah, if only I had done so!!

Anyway, the blog has been updated, and that particular issue is done.

Long-vanished pre-unicode Greek fonts embedded in PDFs – the problem of “Times Ten Greek”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Back in 2010, I wrote about the problem of Greek text formatted in pre-unicode fonts.  Yes, it was a problem even then.  But the problem is still with us, because we have editions of Greek texts, embedded in older PDFs, which are not in unicode.

A PDF from Byzantinische Zeitschrift 98 (2006) contains the following bit of text:

But when I copy the Greek text from line 1, I get this:

MetÛvra, Monã ^AgÝaw TriÀdow

Yes, the PDF has embedded an old pre-unicode font.  Looking at the file properties, I see which one it is:

It was “Times-TenGreek”.  Whatever that was.

A lot of googling gives little information, and a vast number of fake sites offering “downloads” that are of some random font.  Eventually I stumble across this site by Luc Devroye:

Times Ten (Adobe, 1988-1990) was the house font used by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. It has an Adobe version with Greek, called Times Ten Greek Upright (1988-1991). The full family can be found here.

But sadly Times Ten Greek Upright is not there, although other TimesTenFonts are:

Looking at the file name patterns, I conclude that “TimesTenGreek-Upright.otf” or something like that might be the file name.  Searching for this gives a PDF at https://www.fonts.at/pdf/LT_Originals_OT_Edition_3.pdf, which lists four files.

4584. Times® Ten Greek Upright                        TimesTenGreek-Upright.otf
4585. Times® Ten Greek Inclined                        TimesTenGreek-Inclined.otf
4586. Times® Ten Greek Bold                             TimesTenGreek-Bold.otf
4587. Times® Ten Greek Bold Inclined                TimesTenGreek-BdInclined.otf

So these did exist.  But that’s all I can find.  No source from which to obtain it, and no indication of what the encoding was.  Basically we have an electronic text but no way to use it.

This will become a significant problem, if it is not already so.  What can be done about it?

Locating the “Fath al-Bari” (Victory of the Creator) commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Online religious arguments sometimes draw upon sources that most would not encounter.  For instance Muslim posters who disparage the Bible in order to promote the Koran are being met increasingly with quotations from the Hadith of Sahih al-Bukhari (870 AD).  This text contains interesting traditions about the origins of the latter, and quotations from it are found in the Wikipedia article on the Uthmanic Codex.

Also found in the same article are quotations from a 15th century Arabic commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani (d.1449) called the “Fath al-Bari”.  Many of these quotations are themselves interesting.

This commentary is apparently the standard Islamic commentary which sums up everything that has gone before.  But can we access it?  Can we access it in English?

There are a bunch of PDFs of page images of the Arabic text at Archive.org here.  The page images are pretty awful, as is common with cheap printed books in the orient, with no searchable text.  But Archive.org have run OCR software upon them, and the results are in the same directory as “_djvu.txt” files.  These resisted the translate function in the Google Chrome browser.  But if you select a section of the Arabic, it will translate it.

A rather better resource is proper electronic text, from www.al-islam.com, a now vanished website archived here.

None of this is very satisfactory, tho.  In matters of controversy it is always essential to verify sources and to use reputable editions.  Oriental editions often omit important bibliographical information, such as the name of the editor or the place of printing.  But it is possible that reliable editions do exist.

But what about English translations?

In 2017 a translation of volumes 1-3 was published by a certain Khalid Williams through “Visions of Reality” publishers with ISBN-13: 9781909460119.  According to the publisher, this is a single volume of 552 pages.  The publisher webpage is here.  The UK-based Islamic Vision Bookshop (part of the IPCI organisation created by Ahmed Deedat) has a useful blurb, which tells us that the volume is merely the first of a complete translation:

Fatḥ al-Bārī sharh al-Bukhārī (‘Victory of the Creator: Commentary on Bukhārī)’ by Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalānī is widely considered to be the finest commentary on the greatest book of hadith. The initiation of its English translation is a seminal moment which we hope will represent a major contribution to a new wave of Islamic classics in English to meet the needs of Muslim communities in the English-speaking world and also the growing interest on the part of non-Muslims.

Together with the Majestic Qur’ān, Hadiths– the recorded words, actions, approvals and disapprovals of the Prophet ﷺ, – are the main sources of Islamic law and doctrine. Hadiths were evaluated through a rigorous selection process and were compiled in collections in book form of which Imam al-Bukhārī’s al-Jāmi‘ al-Ṣaḥīḥ is considered the greatest.

Over the centuries, hundreds of commentaries have been written on the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī. None, however, have received the same degree of acclaim and critical approval as the Fatḥ al-Bārī of Ibn Ḥajar al-‘Asqalānī (d. 852/1449). This critically important work has retained its immense status and popularity over six centuries since it was completed, as is evident from the many editions available in Arabic today. The main reason for which is the tremendous breadth and depth of the author’s erudition, and the acuteness of his insights and judgement as are evident on every page, can be said to have set a new standard in Hadith scholarship.

Not a single complete commentary of any major Hadith work has ever been published in English, yet the need for them has never been greater than it is today. Hadith studies have suffered from widespread misrepresentation by orientalist scholarship along with the reductionist tendencies of many modernist ‘self-made’ scholars with no traditional training or qualifications freely propagating their own opinions and fatwas, now pose a real threat to the future centrality and stability of the mainstream traditional Islam of Ahl al-Sunna wa al-Jamā‘a especially in the West.

About this edition

This is an immense publishing project, it is hoped that a new volume will be added every few months; the total number of volumes will be in the region of twenty.

At present about one-third of the entire work has been translated.

This volume includes biographical entries for Imam al-Bukhārī and Ibn Hajar, from classical works by al-Sakhāwī and al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī’s, as well as Ibn Ḥajar’s Hādi al-sārī, whose partial translation includes an introduction to Fatḥ al-Bārī, as well as a biography of Imam Bukhārī. This leads to the commentary of Books 1, 2 and 3 of Sahih al-Bukhari.

All well and good.  Except that no further volumes seem to have appeared.  However the project still seems to be alive, as may be learned from  Ælfwine Mischler, “Indexing the translation of Fath al-Bari, a multi-volume Islamic classic”, The Indexer: The International Journal of Indexing 39 (2021), p.165-182.  Unfortunately I have no access to this, but the abstract online here tells us:

Ibn Hajar is only being translated now. Ælfwine Mischler was asked to write multiple indexes for the translation of this multi-volume classic Islamic text. In this article, she describes the nature of Ibn Hajar’s work, some of the challenges in indexing it, and her solutions for writing both cumulative and single-volume indexes.

From somewhere that I can no longer locate, I found the following additional details:

Context: Fath al-Bari is the definitive, multi-volume commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani.

Translation Scope: While the Arabic consists of 97 books in 14 volumes, the English translation, which began in recent years, is estimated to span 15-20 volumes.

Indexing Approach: Ælfwine Mischler is creating indexes for this work, addressing the challenges of translating complex, classical Islamic terminology into English while maintaining usability.

Volume 1 Re-indexing: The first volume of the translation was published with inadequate, non-comprehensive indexes; it is being reprinted with improved, thorough indexes.

Cumulative Indexing: The project aims to produce cumulative indexes to cover the entire work, with two to three new volumes planned for publication annually.

I have written to Dr Mischler to enquire, and if I hear anything back, I will add it.  She is also the author of an earlier paper on the thorny task of indexing Arabic names, which must be a useful contribution.

A google search reveals other materials in English translation.

A completely anonymous but beautifully typeset PDF can be found here, of 148 pages, covering only the first 30 hadiths.  On p.11 there is the following information:

The translation of Ahadith 1 to 30 from Fath al Bari was done by students of knowledge studying in both Madina Munawara and Egypt at al Azhar… It should be noted the translation is only of Hadiths 1 to 30, the last section was translated by Muhtar Holland and taken from his work “Selections from Fath al Bari”. Fath al Bari itself spans many volumes.

But this is not the source of the Wikipedia quotations.

A nicely typeset pamphlet of 25 pages, “Selections from the Fath al-Bari by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani”, translated by Abdal Hakim Murad, Cambridge: Muslim Academic Trust (2000) can be found here.

Undoubtedly we must wish Khalid Williams all strength to his arm in translating the whole thing.  Everybody benefits from having such sources available in the most widely spoken language in the world.

In the 1950s the Americans transferred the ownership of the western oil industry in the Persian Gulf over to various petty local rulers.  This had the effect of making a handful of mainly Arabic-speaking individuals wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice.  This has enriched firms like Mercedes-Benz and similar.  But none of this money seems to have flowed in the direction of making Arabic literature better known to the world.  We still rely on Brockelmann’s hopeless Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur as an index.  Nor has it funded the immense task of turning that literature into English.  I have no idea why this is.  The efforts of Muslim translators in the west seem so plainly the work of an underfunded few.  Let us admire those efforts therefore, and hope that one day things will be otherwise.

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve been on holiday since 25 February, and I have even managed to go away.  Hurrah!   But fear not, I shall not post my holiday photographs.  It was mostly very grey up there anyway.  But even though I did not get any kind of holiday feeling while I was actually away, I do feel “off the treadmill” now that I am back. I’m going to hold onto that feeling while I can.

So although I am now back, I haven’t settled back to work yet.  Posting will resume when I feel like it, when I get back to my projects; and specifically to Procopius of Gaza.

Instead I have been outdoors fiddling with a garden hose, inherited from my father.  The connector on the end has failed, but I could not find another for sale on the web.  Today I took the wretched thing into a plumbers’ merchant.  He looked at it, and decided that it was not actually a connector at all, but rather part of a tap.  He disappeared and brought back a tap, and, sure enough, there was an identical piece on the end!  It seems that my dad simply adapted a piece of an old tap that he had lying around.  The result served his purpose, and indeed it worked better than the commercial connectors that I have seen.  He was an engineer, accustomed to making do with whatever was available, and this was one of his successes.  Sadly I had to buy a whole new tap in order to get the same piece.

An hour ago I was lying on the sofa, and on a whim reread an old post that I wrote on the Welsh village of Llan Awst.  I was rather surprised to find that a couple of the pictures were not longer displaying.  This I have just fixed, but it is very odd that they were not there.  Some odd, WordPressy thing had caused them to stop working.  I wonder whether other posts have suffered the same glitch.  I really ought to convert older posts to a static page.

While I was away, I found myself musing that I would like to have more monitors on my PC than I have.  I have three, which is one more than I ever had in my working days, and quite nice all by itself.  But six would be better.  However, if I had more, I’d have to have two rows of them, one above the other.  I suspect that this would swiftly result in a crick in the neck.  So maybe I am best off as I am.

There is also the question of whether there are enough ports on the PC.  Here I had a breakthrough.  I discovered that I have more video ports than I thought I had.  I always knew that I had three on the graphics card.  But another two that I had not noticed on the motherboard also have sockets on the back, and can be used for non-game work, as I have verified.  That gives me five ports.  Also I believe that I could daisy-chain monitors, if I had monitors that had a “displayport-out” port, to get the sixth.

Sadly the monitors that I have are all very old Benq VW2245-T 21.5″ items, which don’t have any sort of displayport on them at all. They’re all identical and I got them dirt-cheap from eBay way back in 2018, second-hand at $50 a pop.  At that time I was working from home very temporarily with a work-supplied laptop and a docking station.  They wouldn’t lend me any screens, and I didn’t want to spend much money for a two-week job.  Yet they’re perfectly serviceable.  Indeed I don’t want larger screens, because I have no space.

These old Benq screens also lack a VESA socket on the back to attach a modern stand.  They came with their own custom stands, which are fine.  But this means that they can’t be used with a modern stand designed for multiple screens.  If I had a row of screens above the current lot, I would need such a stand, probably floor-standing.  It is possible to get a non-VESA adapter, to hook over the edge of the old screens, but these are ugly.

Likewise I find that you cannot get a displayport-out port on anything smaller than a 24″ monitor, and the ones that have them are $200 each.  So three new ones would cost quite a bit, as well as being too large; six new ones would really cost a lot.  So I think I will stick with my existing setup.

Today I was fretting a bit about how old some of my software is getting.  But I’m not going to buy subscriptions of anything.  I would like a new copy of Adobe Acrobat, or one not 20 years old; but no perpetual licenses are sold now.  I will have to do something, tho, because it’s starting to have trouble with newer PDF files.  Likewise I always bought every new version of Abbyy Finereader, so I am only one version behind.  But the latest version has no perpetual license.  Really Governments ought to do something about this “subscription” racket, where you have to buy your software again and again every year.  But here too I think I will carry on as I am.

Tonight the fog swirls around my house.  But the forecast for tomorrow is sunshine.  So I suspect that I will drive out to the village where a lady friend lives, and we shall go out for tea and a scone somewhere.  Perhaps in the afternoon I will wrestle with garden hoses; or perhaps not.

Good night everyone, and sweet dreams.