Reading ancient texts in the “widest form possible” (Charles Kuper’s talk)
In Charles Kuper’s talk, “The Grammar of Sanctity,” he provided a critical analysis on some of the earliest versions of the story “The life of Euphrosyne who was called Smaragdus.” Euphrosyne was a woman who disguised herself as a man ( Smaragdus) in order to join a monastery. There are 13 versions of this manuscript in Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Armenian, and many of the versions are significantly different as to when they use the name “Euphrosyne” or “Smaragdus” and “him” or “her” at different times throughout the text. Since pronouns in Latin and Greek indicate the gender of the subject (I don’t know about Syriac and Armenian), the authors of many of the original manuscripts used their own interpretation of the story in order to choose a masculine, feminine, or neutral pronoun. Since Kuper wants to write a translation in which he does not take a singular stance on Euphrosyne’s/Smaradus’s gender at these ambiguous moments in the story, he replaces many pronouns with *NO SUBJECT* [his or her] or *NO SUBJECT* [he or she]. He showed pictures of pages where this was used in almost every sentence (and it actually seemed difficult to read at times), but he is just trying to best represent all of the possibilities instead of interjecting his own interpretation.
Kuper said that when writing a translation, you always need to have one main manuscript that provides the basis for the storyline. While he does follow one text more closely than the others, he does want to try and give an accurate account of the works of all original 13 authors to the best of his abilities. He mentioned that one modern interpretation says that Euphrosyne was trangender, but he feels like making a generalizing statement like this does injustice to the complexities of the text. He said that it is best to read ancient texts like this, and hagiography in particular, in the “widest form possible.” This seems like a really good idea when reading history, and historians like him make it possible for us to read a single book, and benefit and learn from other interpretations of the story (via footnotes, text, etc). This is particularly important for non open-source manuscripts.
Lastly, I thought one of the questions from an audience member was really interesting. The audience member asked if Kuper ever thought of writing his translation as an online document with hyperlinks to show more detail. He said that his translation is intended for print, but briefly acknowledged the “visual humanities.” I’m excited to keep my eyes open for texts like this as technology and the field of visual humanities keeps developing.
