This article examines the advantages and difficulties that might be encountered by a researcher who, in the initial phase of his work on a translated text, turns to the Index of Slavonic Translated Literature of the noted Belgian paleoslavist Francis Thomson. The homily In tranfigurationem Domini by Proclus of Constantinople (BHG 1980, CPG 5807) is chosen as an example. A comparison of the data from the 9 cards for this homily with current scholarship shows that their information generally represents a very good starting point. Sometimes the identification of manuscripts that are cited without a repository or signature, and of abbreviated titles of secondary literature, creates difficulties for the user. After a review of the now partly outdated information in the cards concerning the classification of Slavonic translations and the relationship between them, it is pointed out that it would be good to correct them. And this would be possible only with the participation of the broad scholarly community by using the methodology and the model that the team of the project “The Slavonic Metaphrasis of Byzantine Orthodoxy” should propose.
The present paper addresses the problem of telling independent translations from later retranslations. Though telling these apart forms part and parcel of the practice of Paleoslavic text research, up to this date no effort has been made to formulate a generally applicable methodology of going about this task. Sound intuition and personal reading experience are still the standard to go by. In this paper an outline is provided of what such a methodology could look like, suggesting and discussing a set of basic criteria for distinguishing what we term parallel against retranslations. This will be done based on the Slavonic Life of Eupraxia, for which alternate renderings pointing to starkly different text versions have been registered. This paper will take the cards on Eupraxia from Francis Thomson’s cartotheca as a point of departure and start with a discussion of the translations identified on his EUPRAXIA cards.
