Старобългарският превод на Стария Завет. Т. 1. Книга на Дванадесетте пророци с тълкования (= Старобългарският превод на Стария Завет. Т. 1)
The Old Bulgarian Translation of the Old Testament. Vol. 1. The Book of the Twelve Prophets with Commentaries (= The Old Bulgarian Translation of the Old Testament. Vol. 1)

Author(s): Roumyana Zlatanova
Contributor(s): Svetlina Nikolova (Editor), Ilko Grancharov (Illustrator)
Subject(s): Language studies, Language and Literature Studies
Published by: Кирило-Методиевски научен център при Българска академия на науките
Summary/Abstract: The beginnings of all European literary languages and literatures were laid by the translation of the Holy Scripture. Its first translation into a Slavonic language - that of the Bulgarian Slavs inhabiting the area around the city of Salonica - dates back to the second half of the 9th century. It has long been recognized in Slavistics that it is necessary to study the original biblical translation and prepare a critical edition of the biblical texts. Still absent are, however, sufficiently dependable and purposeful studies revealing the overall textual tradition of each particular book of the Bible on the basis of which it is only possible to obtain a clear and categorical idea of the size and character of the original Slavonic translation in its three recensions: prophetological, full and with commentary, made by the First Apostles of the Slavs, their direct adherents and later followers in Byzantium, Pannonia and Bulgaria. A satisfactory solution of this problem, however, requires to start with single publications of the most representative copies of a particular recension, version, textual form, ect. A contribution to this urgent task are also the first editions, planned by the Bulgarian Biblical Commission at the International Committee of Slavicists, of a diplomatic type according to the earliest biblical codex of Slavonic Cyrillic Old Testament text known so far: the Middle Bulgarian manuscript of the late 14th c., F.I.461, kept in the Russian National Library, St. Petersburg. It includes also the oldest copy of the Book of the Twelve Prophets and its consecutive exposition, enriched by exegetic commentaries in Preslav in the 10th c. and designed to by read outside divine service. This apograph was selected as the basis for our publication. 1.0. The i n t r o d u c t i o n (pp. 9-12) deals with some general questions regarding Old Testament prophecy as a phenomenon, with the place of prophetic books among the other books of the Old Testament, their characterization as collections of books which is obvious for the Book of the Twelve Prophets, for the chronological sequence of the individual books of the Twelve Prophets according to the Talmud and the Vulgate: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi (from the 8th to the 5th c. B. C.) - an arrangement followed also by the Old Bulgarian translator. The sequence of the first six books in the translation of the Septuagint is different: Hosea, Amos, Micah, Joel, Obadiah and Jonah. Fundamental problems are noted with regard to the achievements of biblical textology in general and in particular with the translation of the Septuagint insofar as the Slavonic marterial reflects the same complex and gradual textual development which characterizes also its Greek models (pp. 13-16). The basis of the present publication is the Greek text of the Septuagint according to the critical edition of Joseph Ziegler of 1943/1984. 1.1. To elucidate the textological relationship between the separate translator's types and recensions connected with the Book of the Twelve Prophets, a review is made of the composition and external structure of this book of the Old Testament in the Slavonic manuscript tradition (pp. 21-46). 1. With regard to the incomplete liturgical prophetologic recension it has been established that most fully are represented the pericopes in the Prophetologion of Lobkovskij (Ik), followed by Grigorovichev (gr) and of Zakharinskij (zh). Distinguished by its consistent innovation is the the Prophetologion of Lyapunovskij (Ip) which testifies the dissemination in Russia of a new recension of the original translation of the Prophetologion, based on a Greek treatment of the Prophetologion in the 14th c. Data from an analysis of the Books of Joel and Jonah are presented. 2. The later full translation is available in the Croatian Glagolitic tradition. Five breviaries Vb2 1391, VO 1396, D 1407, N1 1459 and Ma 1460 give the translation on a Greek basis (cf. Table 2). First ranks VO with 34 chapiters (of a total of 66) or 52% and 433 verses or 41% of the entire composition (1,049 verses) of this prophetic book. D, N1 and Vb2 follow. With respect to the Book of the Twelve Prophets, therefore, the claim of the comprehensive translation of the Bible by St. Methodius has not been confirmed by the data of the breviaries known to us so far. A textological study compares these apographs among themselves and also with the prophetologic ones (for the Book of Jonah). In the later secondary treatment and translation on a Latin basis (Vt5 1379, Pm 1360, Bb 1470, Vt10 1485, L 1490, Br 1561, NY 15 c.) are attested almost the same number of translated chapters - 35 (of 66 = 53%), but with a smaller number of verses - 356 (of 1,049 = 34%). Cf Table 3. 3. The full prophetic text is complemented by commentaries of the Theodoret of Cyrus (393-460), translated during the time of King Simeon (893-927) in Preslav. At the end of the prophetic text to each book are added biographic explanations for the respective prophets. Their Old Bulgarian translation follows the short recension of Dorotheus, Bishop of Tyre from 303 to 362, or the version of the Greek menologies and synaxaria, and partially the full recension of St. Epiphanius of Cyprus (315-403). An idea of the exact composition and structure provide the following representatives of this Preslav recension with commentary: pb (= F.I.461, 14th c., Bulgaria), m (= Ščukin No. 507 of 1475, Moldavia), s (= Solov. Mon. No. 717 of 1492, Russia) and t (= Troitsk.-Serg. Laura No. 89, 15th-16th cc., Russia). Cf. Table 4. Later also apographs without commentary but with an abridged introductory text, like f (= F.I.3, 15th c., Ukraine) and su (= StPbg BAN 24.4.28 of 1507, Russia) or without commentary at all, like b (= Bucur. Bibl. Acad. No. 84 of the 16th c., Serbia) and h (= Heidelberg Ms. 16,18th c., Russia) were in use. Cf. Table 5. On the basis of comparative textual-critical analysis the relationship between these apographs is presented in a genealogical stemma. 1.2. The Preslav translation of the Book of the Twelve Prophets with Commentary is represented by the two Middle Bulgarian a p o g r a p h s F.I.461 of the late 14th c. and Ščukin No. 507 of 1475 (pp. 47-110). Their palaeographic codicologic study separately includes: external description, handwriting, graphemic analysis, ornamentation, codicologic notes, spelling (on the basis of full statistical data). Whereas F.I.461 presents a transitory pre-Euthymius spelling and linguistic principles on an East Bulgarian speaking basis, Ščukin No. 507 steadfastly follows the spelling and linguistic principles of Euthymius in a literary practice, characteristic of the Moldavian manuscripts. 1.3. The p r i n c i p l e s of rendering the text in the edition (pp. 111-114) are directed to the most accurate possible reproduction of the basic manuscript F.I.461 with different readings according to Ščukin No. 507. The critical apparatus is divided into two parts. In the first part are included palaeographic particularities, mistakes of the copyist, marginal notes, ornamentation, and the like. The second part comprises the different readings in the two apographs of morphological, word-formation and lexical nature, and different readings with regard to the Greek models which are relevant to the Greek recensions. 2.0. Part t w o of the book (pp. 133-247) includes the text from the Book of the Twelve Prophets, attested in F.I.461. An important addition for the further textological and linguistic-critical work on this text with direct relevance to the compilation of future Old Bulgarian-Greek and Greek-Old Bulgarian biblical dictionaries and respective concordance are: 3.0. The G r e e k - B u l g a r i a n dictionary-index (pp. 249-417), contains all the attested Greek lexical units - 2,231 headwords in 13,248 uses of words with accurate grammatical characteristics of each form and their Slavonic coorrespondences: words, collocations, periphrases etc. with precise signature for the place of the cited words on page, line and type of text in with it is encountered. The distinction of the prophetic text from the non-prophetic, typeset italics, aims at facilitating work in future typological comparisons and lexical studies of the text. This dictionary also contains 185 names - proper, local, ethnical names, - marked in 655 word uses. By its range the dictionary is a novelty in Palaeoslavistic lexicography. 4.0. A separate l i s t of the proper, local, and ethnical n a m e s is given, complete with their Greek correspondence (pp. 418-421). 5.0. The i n d e x of the w o r d f o r m s in F.I.461 (pp. 423-549) contains 6,994 wordforms in 19,148 word usages, including letter signs of figures and 324 wordforms of names - proper (133), local (138), ethnical (53) - with precise indication of their frequency and full signatures. They are written in the precise graphic form from F.I.461. The index was drawn up with the aid of the Tustep Programme, Tübingen. 6.0. A r e v e r s e v o c a b u l a r y contains 6,192 wordforms (pp. 551-599). The graphic variants and the diacritical marks have been omitted. This is the first time a systematic presentation of the vocabulary of the Preslav translation of the prophetic books, in their interpretative recension, has been realized. It was compiled using the Tustep Programme, Tübingen.

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