Four Byzantine Novels: Liverpool University Press - Translated Texts for Historians, cartea 1
Autor Elizabeth Jeffreysen Limba Engleză Hardback – 8 iul 2012
Four of the earliest novels ever written— all from twelfth-century Constantinople— are now available in new translations in a single volume. These novels, perhaps the most attractive and unexpected products of the Byzantine millennium, have been largely neglected by scholars and readers. Placing the novels and their writers in their literary and historical contexts, this volume is the most recent step toward a critical restoration of these works that follow the romantic adventures of Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781846318252
ISBN-10: 1846318254
Pagini: 504
Dimensiuni: 155 x 211 x 41 mm
Greutate: 0.84 kg
Ediția:Critical
Editura: Liverpool University Press
Seria Liverpool University Press - Translated Texts for Historians
ISBN-10: 1846318254
Pagini: 504
Dimensiuni: 155 x 211 x 41 mm
Greutate: 0.84 kg
Ediția:Critical
Editura: Liverpool University Press
Seria Liverpool University Press - Translated Texts for Historians
Cuprins
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
Theodore Prodromos, Rhodanthe and Dosikles
Introduction
Translation
Eumathios Makrembolites, Hysmine and Hysminias
Introduction
Translation
Constantine Manasses, Aristandros and Kallithea
Introduction
Translation
Niketas Eugenianos, Drosilla and Charikles
Introduction
Translation
Bibliography
General Index
Index of Persons and Places
Abbreviations
Introduction
Theodore Prodromos, Rhodanthe and Dosikles
Introduction
Translation
Eumathios Makrembolites, Hysmine and Hysminias
Introduction
Translation
Constantine Manasses, Aristandros and Kallithea
Introduction
Translation
Niketas Eugenianos, Drosilla and Charikles
Introduction
Translation
Bibliography
General Index
Index of Persons and Places
Recenzii
“A landmark work. Original and authoritative scholarship.”
A landmark work. Original and authoritative scholarship. -- Professor Roderick Beaton This wonderful book presents for the first time to a modern readership four important yet seldom known novels, dating back to twelfth-century Constantinople: Theodore Prodromos's Rhodanthe and Dosikles, Eumathios Makrembolites's Hysmine and Hysminias, Constantine Manasses's Aristandrosand Kallithea, and Niketas Eugenianos's Drosilla and Charikles. Until very recently, these texts have been largely overlooked, and Elizabeth Jeffreys's much-needed edition and study is a landmark contribution that will make them available to a wider audience and have a lasting impact on literary scholarship. This beautifully edited volume does important work in filling in some of the missing links in understanding between late Antique and Early Renaissance prose fiction writing, between the work of Heliodorus or Achilles Tatius and that of Cervantes or Rabelais. Jeffreys's excellent translation and helpful footnoting bring the old texts back to life not only for the Byzantine Studies specialist, but also for scholars in related disciplines (such as Romance Literatures, and Medieval and Early Modern Studies), and indeed to anyone with a serious interest in the history and development of narrative genres. For all four novels, Jeffreys notes the influence of post-classical rhetoric in the constitution of narrative strategy and of fictional writing. This essential feature was passed on to Renaissance authors such as Cervantes, but has to date received very little critical attention. Equally important features are pastiche and digression, both of which betray a conscious effort to expand basic narrative plots (love and adventure, separation and reunion) into multi-layered, atomized, non-linear narratives. It is easy to see why these texts would have fascinated Baroque Europe, a culture obsessed with the production of meaning and reader engagement through textual commentary and interpretation. In a manner that is consistent with these formal concerns, erotic vicissitude is often appropriated for ideological comment, and the frequent use of fantasy and fantastic elements (such as the retelling of mythical legends, or the description of dreams) becomes a crafty narrative device for plot development and narrative denouement. That these texts have been allowed to remain largely ignored for centuries is a sad reminder of just how narrow the limits of the modern literary canon can be, and further proof of their damaging effect on a fabulous literary legacy. We have much to thank Professor Jeffreys for, but still much more is left to do. This essential volume is both a small joyous triumph and a great step forward in the right direction. -- Carles Gutierrez-Sanfeliu Parergon, Volume 30.1 2013 This beautifully edited volume does important work in filling in some of the missing links in understanding between late Antique and Early Renaissance prose fiction writing, between the work of Heliodorus or Achilles Tatius and that of Cervantes or Rabelais. Jeffreys's excellent translation and helpful footnoting bring the old texts back to life not only for the Byzantine Studies specialist. ... This essential volume is both a small joyous triumph and a great step forward in the right direction. -- Carles Gutierrez-Sanfeliu Parergon, Volume 30.1 2013 The volume under review inaugurates the new series Translated Texts for Byzantinists (TTB) by Liverpool University Press, a kind of pendant to the highly successful Translated Texts for Historians that the same publisher launched more than thirty years ago. The need for reliable translations of Byzantine texts in times when the knowledge of Ancient Greek at university level steadily retreats is pressing; therefore, a series like the TTB is most welcome, much more so since Byzantine Greek is not identical to classroom Attic prose, standing as it were between late Hellenistic and early Modern Greek. Moreover, despite the interest of a broader public for Byzantine culture, especially through contact with major exhibitions that have been organized world-wide over the past twenty years, the knowledge of Byzantine literature even among the neighbouring fields of Medieval, Islamic and Slavic Studies is restricted. A targeted series that will include a broad variety of texts from different periods and genres will hopefully open a gate to Byzantium and its culture, so important for the history of the Medieval Mediterranean. The four twelfth-century novels gathered in this volume and translated by Elizabeth Jeffreys, herself a specialist of the twelfth century and one of the new series' editors, form just such a gate. These four novels - one in prose and three in verse - have been translated only into Italian as a whole (Fabrizio Conca, Turin 1994 with facing Greek text), while the one or the other have been translated into German, French, Greek, Spanish and Russian. Only Eugenianos' novel has been translated into English (Joan Burton, Wauconda, IL 2004 with facing Greek text), but this translation, though it merits attention, has not been widely used. Despite, therefore, the immense interest over the past thirty years among medievalists in the rise of fiction and its theory - an interest accompanied by an ever-growing number of publications - the Komnenian novels (but also the Palaiologan romances) have rather remained in the back-stage of medieval fiction studies, if one is to judge by their absence in volumes like the Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, edited by Roberta Krueger (Cambridge 2000). The present volume includes translations of the three fully surviving novels (Prodromos, Makrembolites, Eugenianos), as well as a translation of Manasses' novel that survives only through a series of excerpts. There is a very brief general introduction since each novel is preceded by a separate introduction. All four introductions display the same content structure: (a) author, (b) date, (c) transmission and reception, (d) form, (e) plot summary, (f) characteristics and themes, (g) manuscripts, editions and translations. Thus, even if the general introduction does not include a broader presentation of the four novels in comparison, the readers will be able to get an idea by looking comparatively at the same sections of each individual introduction. These introductions are lucidly written and readable. The bibliography is fully updated while thorny issues (e. g. dates of composition, patrons and social context) are fairly and objectively presented. The main part of the book is, obviously, the translation of the four novels. The high, sometimes tortuous rhetoric of the texts - especially in the case of Prodromos and his pupil Eugenianos - make the translation extremely difficult because the translator has to make choices about how close s/he will remain to the original or to what extent s/he will render the text in a more free, let us call it poetic, manner. I might be allowed to offer only one passage as a sample of the difficulty involved. It comes from Eugenianos' novel Drosilla and Charikles, where the young Kallidemos, son of the innkeeper in a village along the Syrian coast, delivers to Drosilla, the novel's heroine, a lengthy monologue trying to woo the beautiful maiden. At some point, he introduces a diatribe on famous fictional lovers of bygone days with a narratorial intervention (D&C 6.382-385). Following the original Greek are three translations of the four introductory verses (Burton, Agapitos, Jeffreys): Akappaomicronupsilonepsilon lambdaomicroniotapionu kappaalphai deltaiotadelta sigmakappaomicronupsilon kappaalphai sigmaunuepsilon , h nu nu pialpharho' hmu nu mualpharhogammaalpharhoosigmatauepsilonrhonuomicron kappaorhoeta, phiusigmaepsiloniota lambdaalphachiomicron sigmaalpha chirhoupsilonsigmaomicronbetaosigmataurhoupsilonchiomicronnu kappaomuetanu, tauo kappa mualpha, tauonu kappalambdaudeltaomeganualpha, tauhnu zeta lambdaetanu osigmaetanu. Listen, then, learn, and understand, o girl now beside me, with your pearly breasts and naturally golden locks of hair - comprehend the size of love's waves, rough waters, and storm! Oh maiden with the pearly-bright chest and the naturally golden-coloured locks sitting now next to me! Listen, then, and learn and comprehend the size of the waves, the torrents, the storms of my love. Listen then and learn and comprehend, pearl-breasted girl who are now before us, and on whom nature has bestowed a mane of fair curly hair, comprehend how great is the wave, the storm, the tempest. The contorted syntax (the objects appear in the fourth verse, while the verbs governing these objects appear in the first verse, with a direct address in the second verse and a separate participial explicatory clause in the third verse), the two tricola abundantia in vv. 1 and 4 and the two long compound hapax words in vv. 2 and 3 (the latter placed in the same metrical position and characterizing two almost identical sounding nouns) make any attempt to render these lines of high rhetoric - delivered by a boorish villager and thus a priori subversive as to their effect - in a manner even remotely appropriate to the Byzantine original impossible. The three translations, though they convey the basic meaning of the four verses, go somewhat different ways as to the rendering of this Byzantine rhetorical flourish. The reviewer does not wish to pass a comparative judgement on the three versions of this passage, but only to underline that the four novels are full with such problems, that also make at times the Greek itself very difficult to understand. Given these difficulties and after many years of work, Elizabeth Jeffreys has succeeded admirably in presenting accurate and readable translations. The translations will certainly be of great service to the study of fiction in Byzantium, while also acquainting a wider audience of scholars and students with these novels. If the high standards of the volume under review reflect the overall standards of the new series, then we can be certain that this adventurous publishing project will be a success. 4. J. Burton, A Byzantine novel: Drosilla and Charikles by Niketas Eugenianos. A bilingual edition. Translated with introduction and explanatory notes. Wauconda, IL 2004, 27; P.A. Agapitos, In Rhomaian, Frankish and Persian lands: fiction and fictionality in Byzantium and beyond, in P. A. Agapitos / L.B. Mortensen (eds.), Medieval narratives between history and fiction: from the center to the periphery of Europe, c. 1100-1400. Copenhagen 2012, 235-367, spec. 327; Jeffreys, Four Byzantine Novels 423. Byzantinische Zeitschrift (106.1, 2013)
Notă biografică
Elizabeth Jeffreys is the Emerita Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. Her most recent book, with J.H. Pryor, is The Age of the Dromon: The Byzantine Navy ca 500-1204.