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407 Pages
Preface
Metaphrasis: A Byzantine Concept of Rewriting and Its Hagiographical Products represents the first and much authoritative discussion of rewriting in Byzantium. It brings together a rich variety of articles that treat the topic of hagiographical rewriting from various angles. Its authors discuss and comment on different kinds of texts in Greek, but also other languages, including Apophthegmata Patrum, Passions, Saints’ Lives, Enkomia, miracle collections, Synaxaria, and Menologia, which date from late antiquity to late Byzantium. The volume provides case studies of how the same legends evolved throughout time by the process of rewriting. The main driving force is adaptation to various audiences and situations, aesthetic, political, and religious. Each article refers to previous studies and shows how rewriting is central to medieval Christian cultures.
Most chapters collected in the present volume were developed from papers delivered during a symposium held under the auspices of the Centre for Medieval Literature at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense in October 8-10, 2015. Discussions during the symposium brought up many new aspects and approaches that were later included in the contributions, and a further number of researchers were invited to contribute. Since our symposium Professor Emeritus John Wortley passed away, we would like to dedicate our volume to him, in honor of his lasting contribution to scholarship and in gratitude for his enthusiastic participation in our project.
We would also like to thank all of the volume contributors. We are grateful to them for both their insightful and creative chapters and their keen response to and support of this project. Our thanks go also to Andria Andreou for her editorial assistance, and Christina Hadjiafxenti for helping us with the index and the bibliography. We should also thank Martin Barr for his admirable editorial work. We would also like to express our gratitude to our institutions— the University of Cyprus and the University of Southern Denmark—which have supported us financially for organizing the symposium and covering the volume’s editorial costs. Last but not least, the editors wish to thank Marcella Mulder for her guidance and help, as well as the volume’s anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments.
Stavroula Constantinou and Christian Hogel, Nicosia and Odense February 2020
Notes on Editors and Contributors
Andria Andreou
is postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cyprus. She obtained a BA (Byzantine and Modern Greek) and an Ma (Byzantine studies) from the University of Cyprus, before completing an MPhil in European literature and culture at Cambridge University. Her PhD thesis, “The Holy Double: Identity, Desire and Holiness in Byzantine Passions and Lives of Couples” applies concepts drawn from psychoanalysis, performance, and gender studies to explore the relationship between identity, desire, and holiness in Lives and Passions of saintly couples. Her current research focuses on short Byzantine narratives, dreams, and emotions.
Anne Alwis is Senior Lecturer in classical literature at the University of Kent. Her main research interests lie in hagiography, gender, and narrative. Forthcoming publications include Narrating Martyrdom: Rewriting Late-Antique Virgin Martyrs in Byzantium (Liverpool, forthcoming 2020) and “Listen to Her: Rewriting Virgin Martyrs as Orators in the Byzantine Passions of St. Tatiana and St. Ia,” in Koen De Temmerman (ed.), Holy (He)roines (Cambridge).
Stavroula Constantinou is Associate Professor in Byzantine studies at the University of Cyprus. Her research focuses on Byzantine Greek narratives (mainly hagiography and romance), gender, ritual, performance, body, and emotions. She has published extensively on narrative poetics, gendered bodies and emotions, female and male sainthood, Byzantine ideologies concerning women, and literary portraits of women. Currently she is coordinating two interdisciplinary research projects: “Lactating Breasts: Motherhood and Breastfeeding in Antiquity and Byzantium, 4th Century BCE-7th Century CE”; “Storyworlds in Collections: Toward a Theory of the Ancient and Byzantine Tale (2nd Century CE7th Century CE).”
Koen De Temmerman is Professor of classics and European literature at Ghent University, Belgium. He is the author of Crafting Characters: Heroes and Heroines in the Ancient Greek Novel (Oxford, 2014); coeditor of Writing Biography in Greece and Rome: Narrative Technique and Fictionalization (Cambridge, UK, 2016) and Characterization in Ancient Greek Literature (Leiden, 2018); editor of The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Biography (Oxford, 2020). He is the recipient of two European Research Council grants (StG 2013, CoG 2018) on narrative and fiction in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
Kristoffel Demoen
is Professor of ancient and medieval Greek literature at Ghent University. His research interests are primarily related to the transmission, transformation, and adaptation of the ancient literary and cultural tradition, especially in late antiquity and the Byzantine period. He has written and edited books on Gregory of Nazianzos (1996), Byzantine spirituality in word and image (1997), the Greek city as a cultural construct from antiquity to the present (2001), Philostratus’ Apollonius (2009), uth-century Byzantine poetry (2012), and Greek and Latin biography (2016). His major current project is the edition and commentary of the Paradeisos. He is also the director of the Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams (www.dbbe.ugent.be).
Marina Detoraki is Associate Professor of Byzantine philology at the University of Crete. She was visiting professor at the University Ca’Foscari (Venice) in 2018. Detoraki’s research fields include hagiography, history and editions of texts, Byzantine literary genres. She has won the Award of Academy of Athens for her book Le Martyre de St Aréthas et de ses compagnons (BHG 166) (Paris, 2007).
Bernard Flusin
is Emeritus Professor of Byzantine literature at Sorbonne Université, Director of Research at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Paris, psL) and Doctor honoris causa of the Aristotle University of Thessalonike. Flusin’s research fields focus on hagiography, history and editions of texts, court ceremonies, and religious civilization, including numerous publications in books and articles. For the last five years, he has been chief editor of the editorial project on the De Cerimoniis of Constantine Porphyrogennitus (Centre d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, Paris).
Laura Franco is a research associate, Hellenic Institute, RHUL, holds a PhD in Byzantine philology and paleography from Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research interests focus on Byzantine hagiography, especially the work of Symeon Metaphrastes, the Lives of female Byzantine saints and the Lives of the stylite saints. Another area of interest is the poetry of Nonnus of Panopolis, in particular his Paraphrase of the Gospel of John.
Martin Hinterberger teaches Byzantine literature at the University of Cyprus. His major research interests are emotions in Byzantine literature and society (particularly envy, jealousy, arrogance, shame), metaphraseis, Byzantine hagiographical literature (auto)biography, and the history of medieval Greek, especially as a literary
language.
Christian Hogel is Professor at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense. He has published widely on Byzantine hagiography, as well as on an early Greek translation of the Quran. He is presently codirector of the Centre for Medieval Literature (York/Odense) and of the Retracing Connections project (Uppsala/Odense).
Daria D. Resh earned her PhD in classics in 2018 at Brown University. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Classics at New York University, working together with David Konstan on an NEH-funded project on the hagiographical dossiers of saints Barbara and Catherine.
Klazina Staat
is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University, Belgium. In 2019, she received her PhD with a study on belief and credibility in late antique Latin hagiographical narratives, which was part of the “Novel Saints” research project (funded by the European Research Council and directed by Koen De Temmerman). She is currently a junior postdoctoral fellow of the Flemish Research Council, focusing on late antique and early medieval travel writings of pilgrims to the Holy Land, Rome, and Constantinople. Her research interests include late antique and early medieval spiritual literature in Latin and Greek, and ancient and modern literary theory.
Julie Van Pelt is postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University, Belgium. She previously held a research position on the project “Novel Saints” (funded by the European Research Council, directed by Koen De Temmerman), where she studied the continuation of ancient fictional narrative traditions in Greek hagiography. In 2016, she became a fellow of the Flemish Research Council (Fwo). In 2019 she was a summer fellow at Dumbarton Oaks. Her current research focuses on disguise, performance, fictionality, gender, and magic in Byzantine hagiography.
Robert Wisniewski is Associate Professor of ancient history at the University of Warsaw. His research focuses on the religious history of late antiquity, and particularly on Christian divination, demonology, hagiography, cult of relics, and clergy. He ran a team responsible for the Latin evidence on the international project the “Cult of the Saints in Late Antiquity” and was a principal investigator of the “Presbyters in the Late Antique West” project.
t John Wortley
was Professor Emeritus of medieval history at the University of Manitoba (Canada), where he taught Byzantine studies for over 30 years. Best known for his work on Byzantine “beneficial tales,’ he also completed, in cooperation with his colleagues in Paris, an annotated translation of the Synopsis of Histories by the uth-century Greek historian, John Scylitzes. For some years he had also been studying the role of relics in Byzantine culture, more specifically the stages by which the enormous relic hoard of Constantinople was assembled prior to 1204. Wortley was also an Anglican priest heavily committed to ecumenism.
Introduction
Rewriting—the inter- and intralingual reworking of a previous text—is for the famous Franco-Czech novelist and critic Milan Kundera not just as a creative act as writing, but also an act that “calls for even more talent, cultivation, and creative power than writing [...] does.”? Indeed rewriting is, as Michelle Woods points out, Kundera’s “modus operandi,’ the inherent nature of his poetics.3 Woods shows how, on the one hand, Kundera rewrites his first works in Czech, which now exist in various and extensively rewritten editions, and how, on the other hand, he reworks his translated work to generate diverse versions of supposedly the same text in both the same and different languages.* Rewriting, which Kundera himself describes as “the spirit of our times,”> is according to a number of contemporary theorists, such as Jean Baudrillard, Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson, and Christian Moraru, an essential feature of postmodern literature and culture.®
What has been described as postmodernism’s “urge to retell” is in fact a persistent characteristic of Western literature from antiquity to the present:’ from Homer to Nonnos of Panopolis, to Symeon Metaphrastes, to Boccaccio, and to Margaret Atwood.’ As pointed out in the oldest surviving progymnasmata— ancient and Byzantine textbooks teaching among other things the art of rewriting? —which was produced by AiliosTheon probably in the ist century CE, Maprtipta dé tovtov xal napa nomtats [...] xal iotopixols, xai amAMs TevTES ot moActol paivovtat TH Mapappdcet dplota KEXENMEVOL, OD LOVoV Ta EXUTAYV Bd Kai TH CAAHAWY LEetaTAdccovtEs. (Progymnasmata, 62.21-25)
There is evidence of this and in poets and historians [...], and in brief, all ancient writers seem to have used paraphrase (paraphrasis) in the best possible way, rephrasing (metaplasis) not only their own writings but those of each other?
Theon goes on to give examples of how an author is rewritten by and rewrites another writer or himself. He shows, for instance, how Homer is rewritten by Archilochos, Demosthenes, and Aeschines; how Theopompos, Demosthenes, and Philistos rewrite Thucydides; and how Demosthenes paraphrases his own writings (Progymnasmata, 62.26-33, 63.1-29, 64.1-24). Theon does not restrict himself to giving examples of authors who have employed rewriting, but he also suggests rewriting exercises for students and prospective authors. These
exercises are found in a part of his treatise which has not survived in its original form, but in an Armenian translation." Theon’s exercises concern either rewritings of one author’s work in the style of another (e.g. the rewriting of a Lysian speech in the style of Demosthenes) or rewritings of given passages by keeping as much as possible their wording.!* For Theon, there are four major types of rewriting: “variation in syntax, by addition, by subtraction, and by substitution, plus combinations of these.” Translation (change from one language to another) and transliteration (change of literary form, for example, from prose to verse and vice versa) are also considered by Theon and his successors as rewriting methods.!+
Theon’s treatment clearly manifests that rewriting is a constant and ongoing process through which literature from the era of Homer until his own times evolves, a fact that is repeated centuries later in André Lefevere’s words that constitute this chapter's epigraph. In short, Theon proves true the idea that rewriting is “as old as the literary system itself,” and, therefore, “one could argue that all writing is a ‘rewriting,” yet “not all writing is rewriting in the same sense.”!5 Literally, to rewrite a text means to write it once again. Thus, rewriting might involve a number of various undertakings: copying a manuscript, editing or reediting a text, translating, paraphrasing, and adapting a work, writing from memory, and retelling a myth, legend, or story that circulates both orally and in a written form.
Premodernity, therefore, in which there is no fixed text, but different realizations of a work (e.g. epic, apocryphal acts, novel/romance, paradoxography, martyr legend, chronicle, and hymn) that derive from both an oral and manuscript transmission, constitutes the rewriting culture par excellence.!® To name the great instability of premodern texts, the famous Swiss-French and Canadian medievalist Paul Zumthor has coined the term “mouvance,”!” which concerns a dynamic process of variation involving writing, speaking, improvisation, modification, scribal intervention, adaptation, reinterpretation, translation, and dissemination. Yet rewriting in premodernity is not just the natural consequence of an oral and manuscript culture, but also an essential element of its ideology and aesthetics.
Ancient epic and tragic poets, for instance, draw their stories from a familiar “myth kitty” while medieval authors often take their own non-Christian story matter from their ancient predecessors. For medieval authors, further sources for drawing their story matter constitute also the Bible and the writings of the early Christian authors. In general, premodern authors are not interested in achieving originality; they show their “artistry less in [their] invention than in [their] plotting—that is, in [their] adaptation of familiar myths.”!® Medieval authors in particular constantly strive to show how their own pieces are in accordance with or constitute continuations, improvements, updatings, clarifications, and interpretations of previous highly regarded works, either ancient or medieval, since it is “through their contribution to an ongoing tradition” that they “gain authority.”!9 To these ends, medieval authors engage in extensive borrowing and reworking, and in so doing they become the forefathers of their postmodern counterparts.2°
Even though Kundera’s rewritings, which constitute powerful manifestations of what he understands as literary creativity, resemble ancient and medieval rewrites, there is, generally speaking, an essential difference between premodern and postmodern rewriting. The first is mostly, as Moraru has described it, “underwriting”; it validates, celebrates, and updates the model text. The second in contrast, is mainly a “counterwriting’”; it undoes the previous text and its ideologies.#! For Moraru, as well as for the aforementioned theorists of postmodernism, current rewritings, in contrast to their premodern counterparts, convey an urgent need to revise, subvert, and strongly criticize previous literary representations of the Western culture’s foundational stories, which promote patriarchal and imperial ideologies.
As suggested above, rewriting can take various forms. For the purposes of the present volume, which is devoted to medieval, mostly Byzantine Greek, hagiographical rewriting, Moraru’s definition is largely adopted:
I define rewriting as an intertextual form that entails a strong tie to “chronologically prior works,’ the “trace” of which is discernible in the text (Owen Miller 28, 31) and is marked by the author as an “intentional” presence rather than as an elusive, faint “echo” (Hollander 64). [...] Rewriting as re-creation dislocates the hierarchical relationship between the original and the replica, the donor and the receiver of forms. (emphasis added)2?
What is mostly under examination here, therefore, is not Zumthor’s mouvance that defines medieval textuality, which is inherently fluid and unstable, but the conscious and intentional rewriting of a previous (mostly canonical) text. The model text is traced in the rewrite, and it constitutes the reason for the latter's creation. Evidently, the rewrite is mainly analyzed and understood through the model text: the language, style, form, and character of the first are examined in relation to those of the second. To a great extent thus, a literary analysis of a rewrite is a comparative discussion in which the model text and its rewriting are treated in equal terms (“rewriting [...] dislocates the hierarchical relationship between the original and the replica’).23 Concerning medieval literature, nevertheless, it is not always easy to undertake a comparative analysis between the original text and its rewrite, either because the first has not survived or because it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to establish which version of the model text was used by the rewriter.4 A case in point is the monumental work of Symeon Metaphrastes, a large collection of saints’ legends consisting of 148 texts (10th c.), which, in turn, underwent a number of rewritings from the Middle Ages to the present.?5
The rewrites discussed in the present volume are composed either in the same language (yet in another linguistic form: archaic, biblical, vernacular, or in anew combination of these forms) with the model text or in a different language. Both author and translator are hence treated as rewriters, since, as Réka Forrai rightly remarks, “a medieval author/compiler [...], as well as a translator [...], would all use the same methods of rewriting.’*° In fact, a premodern translator, unlike a contemporary one, works as an adapter: he/she takes the freedom to change a work written in another language according to her/his own aesthetic and other intentions, as well as the nature and expectations of the rewrite’s audience.”
As Moraru’s definition indicates, and as is also attested by the polymorphous premodern rewrites that have come down to us, rewriting is not a particular literary genre, but it is a mode employed for the production of texts belonging to all major premodern genres (epic, historiography, biography, hagiography, epistolography, hymnography, homiletics, drama, novel/romance, fable, and poetry).2® Yet there are genres, such as exegesis, commentary, florilegium, and excerpt collections,?9 which are by definition rewrites, as they are created—mostly for didactic purposes—on the basis of previous authoritative, yet difficult, works. Texts belonging to these genres, in turn, undergo their own rewritings throughout time.*° The fact that rewriting pervades premodern literary genres is a further indication of its importance in understanding “the evolution of literatures of the past.” But how precisely is a rewrite created? And what are the principles and laws governing its very creation?
2 Rewriting, its Terminology, and Art
Following Moraru, rewriting should be seen as an intertextual form that could be more accurately described through Gérard Genette’s notion of hypertextuality,*! that is “the relationship uniting a text B (hypertext) to an earlier text A (hypotext).”3* In his famous work Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré (Paris, 1982), the most thorough and systematic examination of the process of rewriting, Genette identifies a number of rewriting techniques that he calls “transformations” or “transpositions” through which a new text (hypertext) comes into being by the reworking of a previous text (Aypotext). Genette’s taxonomic system develops out of three main interdependent categories: 1. formal transformations (changes in language, style, and form); 11. narrative transformations (changes in narrative elements: time, space, action, character, and motivation); and 111. quantitative transformations (changes in the dimension of the new text).33
Each rewriting category has its own internal subdivisions for which Genette develops a detailed nomenclature. Mostly, the quantitative transformations are substantiated in the other two categories (formal and narrative transformations), and more specifically in the hypertext’s style (e.g. use of shorter sentences or adoption of an elaborate style), form (e.g. the transformation of a historical or hagiographical work into an epitome through massive textual cutting), and narrative elements (e.g. the addition of narrative comments may change the course of action and characterization). Changes in style and form (e.g. substitution of vernacular words with archaic words, or transformation of the hypotext’s poetic form into a prose form), on the other hand, might affect changes in narrative elements (e.g. the adoption of an archaic style might put a previously lesser character into a different light) and vice versa (e.g. the change of a character’ s evaluation might necessitate the adoption of a different style). In short, any changes in the hypertext’s dimension (quantitative transformations) through abbreviation or amplification are responsible for possible alterations in a formal and/or narrative level, which, in turn, lead to further qualitative changes through which the new text is created.
Genette’s rewriting theory is employed here not only because his categories (formal, narrative, and quantitative transformations) are useful in understanding the workings of premodern rewriters, but also because these very categories—yet not all their subcategories and inventive terminology—are anticipated in ancient and Byzantine progymnasmata (Homeric) scholia, commentaries, lexica, and even the premodern rewriters’ comments. The fact that ancient criticism has considerably influenced the work of Genette and that of contemporary narratologists has been brilliantly shown in a recent book by Genevieve Liveley, Narratology, who summarizes her findings in the following words:
Amongst the ancient scholia critics and commentators, we come across ultimately appreciation for such modern narratological concepts as variant, deviant, and embedded focalization [...]. These ancient theorists and critics turn out to have a specialist narratological lexicon as rich (and as vexing) as anything dreamt up by their modern counterparts too. [...| The Greek scholia employ a highly eclectic technical vocabulary (borrowing heavily from the rich lexicon of ancient rhetorical theory) and are aware not only of key narratological phenomena such as the differences between plot and story, but of the various stages involved in the building and arrangement of a storyworld. [...] They are also interested in prolepsis (flashforward or foreshadowing) and in analepsis (flashback or backshadowing) of various different kinds—akin to the variants described by Genette as “repeating” and “completing” analepsis (described by the scholia as anakephalaiosis or recapitulation, and anaplerosis or completion).34
Of course, Genette’s borrowings from premodern criticism are beyond the scope of this chapter, even though a few of them will be discussed below in an attempt to apprehend the workings of Byzantine rewrites. At this point it should be mentioned that Genette appears to adopt the progymnasmata tradition when he devotes his Palimpsests—which, by the way, is inspired by an object of medieval writing culture, the palimpsest codex that attests to the fluidity of premodern texts—to the art of rewriting. Furthermore, Genette seems to follow Theon’s example when he discusses how one author rewrites another and when, for instance, he rewrites the first stanza of Paul Valéry’s poem “Le cimetiére marin” (1920) in alexandrines or when he proposes a retelling of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1865) from the point of view of the protagonist’s daughter.?5
For these reasons, a comparative discussion of Genettean theory with premodern rewriting criticism is not only valid, but it also contributes to the better understanding of both. At the same time, it brings to the fore the richness and complexity of premodern rewriting, along with some of the limitations of Genette’s theory that does not take into consideration rewrites in collections, and ignores techniques that are applicable to nonnarrative rewrites, such as poetic and rhetorical works. Additionally, Genette does not deal with questions similar to those raised by Lefevere in the above quotation, who insists that those who work on rewritings should “ask themselves who rewrites, why, under what circumstances, for which audience” (emphasis added). He is neither interested in the ideologies and motives determining the choice of particular rewriting techniques and the exclusion of others nor in what connects a rewriter’s hidden decisions to the hypotext’s interpretation and reception. For reasons of space, such questions will be dealt with only partly within the limits of this introductory chapter while some of them are given further consideration by at least three of the volume contributors.?®
In the remaining part of this section, Genette’s three rewriting categories and their subcategories, along with those mentioned and employed by premodern Greek critics and rewriters will be briefly examined in relation to the corresponding Greek terminology—this derives chiefly from ancient and Byzantine progymnasmata, scholia and commentaries, Byzantine lexica, the titles of Byzantine rewrites (that are often later additions), and comments made by the rewriters themselves. The Genettean categorization and subcategorization will be exemplified through reference to Byzantine rewrites, and when applicable through a parallel discussion of a Byzantine Greek rewrite, the anonymous 13th-century War of Troy (wT).
The wT is a rewrite of another rewrite, Benoit de Saint-Maure’s 12thcentury Roman de Troie (RT) that is the French hypertext of two Latin hypotexts: Dares Phrygius’ De Excidio Troiae Historia (5th c. cE), which is presented as a Latin translation of a Greek original allegedly produced by Cornelius Nepos (c.1l0 BCE-c.25 BCE) and Dictys Cretensis’ Ephemeridos Belli Trojani (4th c. CE),?? another supposed translation of a Greek original that, unlike that of Dares, seems to have existed.38 Even though Benoit de Saint-Maure claims in his prologue that he “has followed faithfully the Latin version” of his sources,*? he in fact rewrites them on an extremely grand scale. In Benoit’s hands, the relatively short prose accounts of Dares and Dictys are transformed into a monumental poetic work consisting of 30,316 octosyllabic verses. For example, Benoit rewrites Dares’ repetitive phrase “fit magna caedes” (“a great slaughter took place”) with 23 battle scenes, the largest of which comprises 2,500 lines. Benoit’s battles are intertwined with elaborated ekphrases, and love stories which either occur briefly in the hypotexts or do not feature at all. Whether these two late antique texts (Dares and Dictys) are actually Latin translations of Greek accounts or forgeries is irrelevant for us now.?° In one way or another, both works constitute hypertexts of other hypotexts that are part of a large chain of rewrites which go back to the Homeric epics. Being the oldest hypertexts of Western literature, Homer’s works have initiated the production of innumerable rewritings which also have produced further rewritings throughout the centuries, showing how a work can be simultaneously a hypotext and hypertext, a model for and product of reception.*! In fact, the RT is an exemplary work of the chain of Homeric rewritings, since, due to its great popularity in the Middle Ages, it has instigated a new cycle of hypertexts: it has become a rich source for rewrites in French and other medieval vernacular languages,*” including the aforementioned Greek wT. The wT, in turn, has been produced toward the end of a long tradition of Byzantine rewrites of the Homeric works.*® For our purposes here, the wT is a good case in point also because its Greek-speaking rewriter employs a large number of the rewriting methods discussed by Genette and his premodern counterparts. In so doing, he/she produces a hypertext that is well situated in the literary system of the Palaiologan period.
The method of paraphrasis is the same. When you have to say the same things, either in prose exercises or in the exchange of verses, but you secretly change the style by extending the brief passages and shortening the extended ones, you do the same when you paraphrase someone else’s thoughts, namely when you rework the less clear ones to make them clearer; as Themistios has done with many Aristotelian writings by changing their order or unfolding the short passages. The same is done also by Sopatros in his own rewritings (metabolai) and adaptations (metapoieses) of Demosthenean passages.°!
However, the most common Greek terms for rewriting are metaphrasis and paraphrasis, which are often treated as exact synonyms,*” as attested by a definition of John of Sardis (gth c.) included in his Commentary on Aphthonios’ Progymnasmata (64.23-65.1):53 “napdppacic S€ eottv Epunveiag dAAolwats TH abt dStdvolav puAdttovon. TO adTd dé xal LEThPPACIG MpocwyopEtETaut” (“Paraphrasis is the alteration of style while keeping the same meaning; the same thing is called also metaphrasis”). In the Byzantine world, and more specifically from the 10th century onward, and under the immense influence of Symeon Metaphrastes’ work, metaphrasis becomes the dominant term for rewriting. Apart from being employed as general terms for rewriting, the six Greek words given above have in different texts and contexts also specific meanings concerning particular rewriting methods, such as translation and stylistic and formal transformation. Examples of these meanings are given below in the discussion of Genette’s taxonomy, to which I now turn.
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