By focusing on biblical texts, the Western history of translation has favoured Jewish, Catholic and Protestant traditions. For the first time this study analyses the debates on liturgical translation that took place in the Russian Orthodox Church, where services of liturgical prayer remain in Church Slavonic. An examination of the reasons put forward by the Church to justify its refusal to translate leads to an analysis of the opposing viewpoints of the traditionalists and reformers throughout Russian history. The debates from the end of the XIXth century through the XXth century are at the centre of the thesis, but they are rooted in three great polemics that have deeply influenced the history of the Russian Church over the last twelve centuries. These were the disputes between Cyril and Methodius and the German clergy in the IXth century, between Maxim the Greek and the Russian clergy in the XVI th century, and finally between the Patriarch Nikon and the Old Believers in the XVIIth century. The debates of the traditionalists and the reformers can be summarized by the following dilemma: should religion adapt itself to the people (primacy of comprehensibility) or should the people rise to the level of their religion (primacy of divine mystery conveyed by hieratic language)? While the traditionalists call for patient sobriety and prudence, the reformers plead in favour of more active participation of the laity in liturgical life. The philological and theological arguments underlying the two positions are evaluated from the perspective of the particularities of the Orthodox liturgy and show the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of the problem. In order to shed light on the debate, the study calls upon the experience of the Evangelical Church of Germany (1974 NT-translation of the Luther-Bible for liturgical use) and of the Catholic Church (consequences of the liturgical movement of the Second Vatican Council, particularly its linguistic aspect), which chose to translate their liturgies into the vernacular, opting for the argument of comprehensibility. This study suggests possible solutions to this longstanding debate and should contribute to enrich the field of translation of sacred texts by offering an original perspective on the Orthodox tradition, to which European and North American specialists in translation have paid little interest.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/29763 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Gopenko, Anna |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | French |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 272 p. |
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