The Song of Songs: A Biography

Abstract

ultimately indicative of the fact that, in studying ancient Christian literature, one does not study the text and its translations but synchronic and diachronic versions, whose quintessential fluidity is the conditio sine qua non; and that the cumulative dynamic textual legacy of early Christian traditions is much more rhizomatic and hetoroglossic than one may have assumed. While the reader eventually acquires a general understanding of this fluidity and the pertaining methodological issues by going through the publication article by article, the volume would have greatly benefitted from having either a more extended introduction or a concluding synthetic essay that would go beyond the level of empirical observations and would genuinely bridge various fields of early Christian studies, on the one hand, and theories and approaches that have been appearing in the field of translation studies in recent years, on the other hand (for example, Karen Emmerich’s Literary Translation and the Making of Originals [Bloomsbury Academic, 2017]). The final two-page section in the introduction meant to outline some common themes in the study of patristic translations does not fully unlock the potential of the volume, and a more explicit fusion of case study mosaic remains a desideratum. Of course, the sheer variety of topics, approaches, and problems covered in the volume may be intimidating for anyone attempting to pen a proposed piece, but, after all, the purpose was to set in dialogue unfortunately isolated fields due to the high degree of language specialization. I assume such a real-life dialogue indeed took place during the workshop leading to the publication, but for the readers of the book it remains behind the scenes. Otherwise, the volume offers a valuable collection of articles representing the cutting-edge scholarship in the area, introduces several previously unknown sources and manuscripts, and is a much-needed “step for a corpus-based versional project over the following years” (2).