The Book of Psalms in the Church Slavonic, Greek, and Polish Languages from Simon Azarjin’s Library

Jelena A. Celunova

The Book of Psalms in the Church Slavonic, Greek, and Polish Languages from Simon Azarjin’s Library

Jelena A. Celunova

Abstract

This article is devoted to research on the Book of Psalms manuscript written in the first half of the 17th century from Simon Azarjin’s book collection. The Book of Psalms is written inter-linearly in three languages: Church Slavonic, Greek, and Polish. The availability of the text in Polish in the Orthodox psalms makes this memorable text unique. The research concentrates on the clarification of the aim that led to the creation of the Book of Psalms. The lack of a preface or any other evidence of its author, time, or place of its translation forces us to turn to indirect facts, namely, to research of the textological character and to an analysis of Church Slavonic and Polish texts. Textological research of the Church Slavonic edition of the Book of Psalms reveals its similarity with pre-Nikonian texts and the analyses of the text in Polish allows us to affirm that the author had used the Catholic Leopolita’s Bible in 1561, exposed it to a profound edition—both textological as well as linguistic. The analysis of the inserted changes into the text in Polish and the alternated language itself enables us to assume that the author of the manuscript might have been a native from West Russia, while the text itself had probably been created in the Trinity Monastery of St. Sergius. The efforts aimed at adaptation of the Polish text into the text in Church Slavonic prove that the tri-lingual Book of Psalms might have been created for the inhabitants of the previous territories of Great Principality of Lithuania who converted from the Catholic Church or from the Greek Catholic into the Orthodox Church. The text in Polish had thus been needed especially for those believers practicing the Orthodox religion in order to understand the Church Slavonic language of worship.

Keywords

Book of Psalms; translation; Church Slavonic language; Polish language; inter-linear text; Trinity Monastery of St. Sergius; Simon Azarjin

Full Text:

PDF (Русский)

References

Bunčić D., “The Standardization of Polish Orthography in the 16th Century,” in: S. Baddeley, A. Voeste, eds., Orthographies in Early Modern Europe, Berlin, 2012, 219–254.

Dianova T. V., Kostiukhina L. M., Vodianye znaki rukopisei Rossii XVII v., Moscow, 1980.

Frick D. A., Polish Sacred Philology in the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. Chapters in the History of the Controversies (1551–1632) (= University of California Publications in Modern Philology, 123), Berkeley (CA), 1989.

Grek-Pabisowa I., Maryniakowa I., “Język polski na Kresach północno-wschodnich dawniej i dziś,” in: I. Grek-Pabisowa, ed., Historia i współczesność języka polskiego na Kresach wschodnich, Warszawa, 1997, 27–109.

Isachenko T. A., “Kniga Iova v perevode monakha Chudova monastyria Moiseia (1671 g.): osobennosti iazyka i istoriko-literaturnyi kontekst,” Drevnyaya Rus—Voprosy Medievistiki, 2002, 4 (10), 67–75.

Klitina E. N., “Simon Azarʹin (Novye dannye po maloizuchennym istochnikam),” in: Trudy Otdela drevnerusskoi literatury, 34, Leningrad, 1979, 298–312.

Kloss B. M., Izbrannye trudy, 1: Zhitie Sergiia Radonezhskogo, Moscow, 1998.

Kloss B. M., O proiskhozhdenii nazvaniia “Rossiia”, Moscow, 2012.

Kuryłowicz B. I., Język polski w szesnastowiecznych księgach miejskich Knyszyna, Białystok, 2005.

Kurzowa Z., Język polski Wileńszczyzny i Kresów północno-wschodnich XVI–XX w., Warszawa, Kraków, 1993.

Kurzowa Z., Polszczyzna Lwowa i Kresów południowo-wschodnich do roku 1939, Kraków, 2006.

Luto-Kamińska A., “Alfurkan tatarski Piotra Czyżewskiego — opis zabytku (grafia z elementami fonetyki),” in: Studia z Filologii Polskiej i Słowiańskiej, 50, 2015, Warszawa, 18–47.

Martel A., La langue polonaise dans les pays ruthènes. Ukraine et Russie Blanche. 1569–1667, Lille, 1938.

Moser M., “Zur Polszczyzna kresowa in Weißrussland und der Ukraine und ihrer sprachlichen Charakteristik,” Die Welt der Slaven, 47, 2002, 31–56.

Oparina T. A., Ivan Nasedka i polemicheskoe bogoslovie kievskoi mitropolii, Novosibirsk, 1998.

Pentkovskaya T. V., “The Translation of the Arguments to the Book of Job, 1671, against the Background of Moscow Biblical Translations from Polish,” Moscow State University Bulletin. Series 9. Philology, 2, 2016, 10–39.

Pentkovskaya T. V., “The New Testament in the Translation of the Circle of Epiphanius Slavinetsky and the Polish Translation Tradition of the 16th Century: Translation of Summae in the Apostolos,” Russian Language and Linguistic Theory (Russkij yazyk v nauchnom osveshchenii), 1 (31), 2016, 182–226.

Pietkiewicz R., Pismo Święte w języku polskim w latach 1518–1638. Sytuacja wyznaniowa w Polsce a rozwój edytorstwa biblijnego, Wrocław, 2002.

Semkowicz W., Paleografia Łacińska, Kraków, 1951.

Sicińska K., “Cechy fonetyczne polszczyzny południowokresowej w listach metropolity kijowskiego Jana (Hioba) Boreckiego z lat 1624–1629,” Rozprawy Komisji Językowej ŁTN, 61, 2015, 199–220.

Celunova Je. A., “Kulʹturnaia i iazykovaia situatsiia Velikogo kniazhestva Litovskogo,” in: AION. Slavistica: annali dell’Istituto universitario orientale di Napoli, 5: 1997–1998, Napoli, 2000, 33–109.

Celunova Je. A., Psaltyrʹ 1683 goda v perevode Avramiia Firsova: Tekst, slovoukazatelʹ, issledovanie, Moscow, 2006.

Uspenskij B. A., Izbrannye trudy, 3: Obshchee i slavianskoe iazykoznanie, Moscow, 1997.

Uspenskij B. A., Istoriia russkogo literaturnogo iazyka (XI–XVII vv.), Moscow, 2002.

Verner I. V., “On the History of Maximus the Greek’s Translation of Psalter in 1522–1552: Chronology, Textology, and Methodology,” Slavianovedenie, 2, 2017, 40–54.

Refbacks

There are currently no refbacks.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Username
Password
Remember me