Adam Bremer-McCollum

Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School

Second Soundings in the Lives of Symeon the Fool (Greek, Syriac, Arabic, and Georgian)

The stories compiled in Greek in the seventh century by Leontios of Neapolis on Symeon the Fool soon attracted the attention of translators, with versions in (at least) Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, and Arabic. The earliest dated version of the saint’s life is a Georgian manuscript dated 981, predating manuscripts in Greek and other languages. Among Syriac manuscripts, one is dated 1197, but what is probably the oldest copy of the story is undated, possibly from the eleventh century, and another undated copy is probably from the twelfth century, alongside another incomplete contemporary copy. There are editions of the Greek, Armenian, and Georgian texts, but the Syriac and Arabic texts haven’t yet been published. 

Aside from a preliminary study focused on the Syriac translation, the interrelationships between these texts have yet to be traced, whether it’s the sequence of the translations, the Vorlage(n) used, or translation techniques. The truncated Armenian version seems to come from Greek, and at least one Arabic translation was made from Syriac. Whether the Georgian translation is based on the Greek, the Syriac, or both, remains to be seen, so this is one of my paper’s questions. Second, as Van Rompay has shown, the Syriac translator isn’t afraid to adapt the Greek text in various ways. Is this freedom apparent in the other translations, whether they’re from Greek or Syriac? To answer these and related questions, I will compare the Greek, Syriac, Georgian, and Arabic versions and look at translation technique, focusing on lexicon, narrative and content (order, adding, subtracting), and part-of-speech consistency.