The Book “Лествица” – a Metatext in “Житие на св. Ромил Видински” by Monk Gregoriy Dobropisets

Authors:

Pages: 391-408

Abstract:

The Life of St. Romil Vidinski” is known in its Greek and in its Slavic version. So far, science confirms that the original text was written in Greek and later translated in Old Bulgarian, with the author adding some paragraphs to the text, thus becoming a co-author. The aim of the present research is to elaborate on the short textological history of the biography adding some observations on its intertextual relation to the book “Ladder”, which is present in it as a metatext. The comparisons are based on the three versions of the Old Bulgarian translation of “Ladder”: the Old Preslav Translation (OPT) – 10th century, the Edited Old Translation (EOT) of the old John and/or monk Marko of Athos (the 14th century) and the New Bulgarian Translation (of Euthymius) (NBT) dating from the 14th century. On the basis of the observations it is suggested that the original text of the biography is in Old Bulgarian literary language, while the Greek text represents a translation. The apparent differences between the two texts have given grounds to define the Old Bulgarian text as an expanded version – a rare case of moving from a short Greek text to a rather expanded Old Bulgarian text, which is not characteristic of the Medieval Translation tradition. We cannot, however, exclude the possibility of the biography being composed on the Mount of Athos (a place inhabited by monks of different nationalities) originally in Old Bulgarian, and later translated into Greek as a necessary monastic reading probably by the author himself – monk Grigorii of Athos. But this can only be proved after a linguistic research of the Old Bulgarian and the Greek texts and a comparison between the two on the lexical and stylistic levels.

Keywords:

intertextual relationship, metatext, Greek language, Old Bulgarian language, Lives of Saints, translation, text, quotes, hagiography

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