CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Anđelović, Aleksandar |
|---|---|
| Title | Between the Literal and the Literary: Social Background, Linguistic Competence, and the Bible in the Late-antique Latin Translations of the Vita Antonii |
| Summary | The present study explores verbatim biblical quotations in the two fourth-century translations of the Greek Life of Antony into Latin produced by an anonymous translator and Evagrius of Antioch, respectively. Careful comparison of these translations of the biblical material that was clearly identified as the word of God and thus unlikely to be the subject of a free and creative approach on the part of the translators, yields new insights, not only about the contrasting approaches taken by the two translators but also about their respective literary, linguistic, and theological backgrounds. By offering evidence that the anonymous translator was familiar with the Greek Bible but unacquainted with contemporary Latin versions of the Bible, this study demonstrates that the text of the Bible regarded as authoritative by him was not in Latin but in Greek. Moreover, the study further argues that the anonymous translator’s mechanical and mirror renderings of several specifically Greek syntactical structures suggest that he was not a native speaker of Latin. His word-for-word approach was thus not the result of his conscious decision to be ‘accurate,’ but rather a reflection of his insufficient command of the language into which he was translating. In addition, this study shows that, unlike his anonymous counterpart, Evagrius used for his translation a Latin version of the Bible for which textual parallels can be found in other late antique Latin works, and that he rhetorically embellished and stylistically upgraded the language of the Bible in Latin available to him at the time. This study also provides evidence that Evagrius made use of the older, anonymous translation of the Life in producing his own version. |
| Supervisor | Gaşpar, Cristian-Nicolae; Geréby, György |
| Department | Medieval Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/andjelovic_aleksanda.pdf |
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