The Old Slavic Digenis Akritis: Free Retelling or Rhetorical Translation?

Abstract

André Vaillant, who resolved numerous problems around the Old Slavic version of the Byzantine “romantic epic” Digenis Akritis, claimed that it was not a translation, but “un récit libre d’après une version grecque du poème.” Indeed, in its “folklorism” and epic severity, the Slavic Digenis diverges radically from any extant Greek text, especially its closest relation, the highly romanticized Grottaferrata version. In many places where the Slavic Digenis diverges from the Greek versions, its compiler makes use of oral-traditional formulas or themes found in the Greek and South Slavic oral traditions: the Akritika or ballads of the Byzantine border guards, the Marko Kraljević cycle. Is the Slavic Digenis, radically transformed by oral-formulaic composition, a translation? Vernacular translators of the European Renaissance such as Louis Le Roy granted “the rhetorical resources of the target language … at the very least, ‘equivalent weight’ to those of the source text” (Kenneth Lloyd-Jones), while philologist-translators into Latin such as Henri Estienne (Stephanus) privileged the source language (Greek) and its resources. By analogy, the “rhetorical” oral-formulaicism of the Slavic Digenis may be distinguished from the literalism of “philological” translators of the Euthymian school. Refs 31.