The Corpus Nazianzenum and the Corpus Dionysiacum in the Georgian Literary Tradition

The CD and the CN, the two most significant works of late antiquity, are connected with the name of a famous Georgian scholar of the Black Mountain (the Antioch region), Ephrem Mtsire (Ephrem the Minor). He was a monk on the Black Mountain from the 1070s to the end of the 1090s, residing at the monastery of St Symeon the Younger on the Miraculous Mountain. He was the abbot of the monastery at Kastana from 1091. The Antioch region, where multi-ethnic and multilingual peoples had cohabitated for centuries, had created at that time a favorable background for the exchange of ideas and concepts that had a considerable influence on Ephrem Mtsire in terms of enhancing his intellectual development. He had translated the most important Byzantine works from Greek into Georgian and played a significant role in the development of various genres of Georgian ecclesiastic literature.
The last quarter of the eleventh century is marked by a significant development in the history of medieval Georgian culture: an intellectual trend, called Hellenophilism in contemporary scholarship, appeared in the Georgian literary tradition. The Hellenophile method of translation – transferring every detail and each nuance of the source text into translation – was already in use in the early so-called pre-Athonite epoch (fifth–tenth centuries), especially in translations of the books of the Bible. However, the attempts of early translators were not based on theoretical concepts, they worked without having any translation methodology in mind. By contrast, the Hellenophile method of translation employed in the eleventh-century Black Mountain literary school had a firm theoretical basis that was reflected in Ephrem Mtsire’s colophons and prefaces to his works. Moreover, the Hellenophilism of this epoch touched not only the Georgian translation methodology and Georgian literary language, but also the whole of Georgian culture and scholarly perception. Besides the formation of the concept of ad verbum translation, it played a big role in systematic translation of works of various genres (e.g. works of scholastic and dogmatic theology, commentaries) that, hitherto, had been rarely translated into Georgian, and in shaping the medieval Georgian manuscript – creating Georgian manuscripts along the same lines as the Greek.
The aim of my article is to show what impact the introduction of a Hellenophile translation technique and new genres have had on the Georgian manuscript? How did the concept of verbatim translation affect the literary triangle: text – manuscript – reader? The analysis of the CD and the CN rendered into Georgian in the Hellenophile epoch enables us to elucidate this issue.
Gregory the Theologian’s sermons had been translated into Georgian several times before Ephrem Mtsire. At the end of the eleventh century, Ephrem, at first, filled a gap by translating those sermons of Gregory that had not been translated hitherto, and then he translated Gregory’s sixteen liturgical sermons that had been previously translated by Georgian translators. In addition, he rendered into Georgian the Commentaries of the tenth-century Byzantine scholar Basilius Minimus on Gregory’s sixteen liturgical sermons and the PseudoNonnos’ Mythological Commentaries (explanations of the allusions to Greek mythology made by Gregory in his sermons), appending them to the collection of the sixteen liturgical sermons. This is the collection we have in mind when speaking about the CN in this article.
As for the CD and Commentaries on it, they were translated by Ephrem for the first time