Вестник Екатеринбургской духовной семинарии (Oct 2022)
Translations and Poetic Adaptations of the Great Penitential Canon into Russian (Late 18th–19th Centuries): A Historical Overview
Abstract
This article is devoted to the description of translations and poetic transcriptions of the Great Penitential Canon of St. Andrew of Crete into Russian. In view of their large number, the article is limited only to the period from the end of the 18th century (when the first poetic arrangements appeared) to the 19th century. In total, seven translations and poetic transcriptions were published during this period: four full-fledged poetic transcriptions of the entire Canon (“The Great Canon, the Creation of St. Andrew, Archbishop of Crete, Translated in Verse” by S. Rindovsky and F. Lenkevich, “The Pious Occupation of Those Fasting, or the Canon of Andrew of Crete, Resident of Jerusalem, Translated in Verse by the Blind Gavriil Pakatsky, Priest of the Church of the Holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Sovereigns Constantine and Helena, Which is at the City Almshouses”, “Songs of Repentance, or the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, Accompanied by Live Stories of the Saints of God: Andrew of Crete and Mary of Egypt, in Verse” by S. Izvolsky, and “The Canon of Our Venerable Father Andrew of Crete, the Jerusalem Resident, Translated into Verse by Hieromonk Gerontiy Levitsky, a Member of the Beijing Ecclesiastical Mission”), one poem-imitation of several troparia of the Canon (from the poem “A Year in the Monastery” by A. N. Apukhtin), and two prose translations (one by Archpriest M. I. Bogoslovsky and the “Liturgical Canons in the Greek, Slavonic, and Russian Languages” by E. I. Loviagin). Translations of the Great Canon began to appear at the end of the 18th century, when the process of the separation of the Russian literary language from Church Slavonic took place. The poetic form of the transcriptions can be explained by the popularity at this time of the genre of verses, a variety of poems of ecclesiastical or secular content. The transcriptions and translations themselves were intended for cell use. This article examines the history, structure, degree of accuracy to the original meaning of the canon of the translations, as well as, in case it is a poetic arrangement, the poetic structure and number of lines. In the course of the study, it was found that many of the translations and transcriptions were actively reprinted in pre-Revolutionary times, and that the metrical structure of the poetic transcriptions of the canon was iambic. The number of lines in them varied — from couplets to twenty-nine verses. The meaning of the troparia of the Great Canon is conveyed correctly in most translations and transcriptions. In this article, two poetic arrangements are described and introduced into scientific circulation for the first time: those of F. Lenkevich (1799) and S. Izvolsky (1871). F. Lenkevich’s arrangement is published in the appendix to the article.
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