The Directionality of Grammatical and Lexical Patterning in the Slavic Translations of the Alexander Romance and Digenis Akritis

• In Event: Pre-Modern Translations: From Kyiv to Nerchinsk

Abstract

Speranskii lexically located the translation of the Byzantine "romantic epic" Digenis Akritis in Kyivan Rus; Orlov narrowed it to Galicia by its style; and Likhachev proposed a thesis accounting for its passage from Galicia to Suzdal in Russia. Most recently, Bruni and Pichkhadze have analyzed "native" East Slavic lexical, grammatical, and syntactic forms in the Slavic Digenis. Vaillant, however, made a philological case for the translation of Digenis in 14th-c. Macedonia, explaining the manuscripts' East Slavic features as a result of the work's later Russian transmission. This thesis will be tested by a comparison with the transmission of the Alexander Romance, translated from Greek into Serbo-Slavonic in the later 14th c. and thence into Muscovite Slavonic in the 15th c.

Author

• Robert Romanchuk, Florida State U