The Loss and Reacquisition of Caffa: The Status of the Geno­ese Entrepôt within the Borders of the Golden Horde

Research objectives: To analyze both the circumstances of the armed conflict of Genoese Caffa with the troops of the Golden Horde ruler, Toqta Khan, in 1307–1308, which ended with the temporary expulsion of Italian merchants from the Jöchid territory, and their return to Caffa under Toqta’s nephew and successor, Özbeg Khan. Research materials: The information on the conflict between the Genoese and Toqta Khan is contained in an anonymous continuation of the chronicle of the Genoese Archbishop, Jacopo da Varagine, dating to the middle of the fourteenth century; in the chronicles of the Mamluk authors, Baybars al-Mansuri and al-Nuwayri; and in a local Greek source, namely the Sugdeian Synaxarion. In turn, sources that provide information about the circumstances and conditions of the return of the Genoese are much more diverse. Of course, the most important details are contained in the official documents of Genoa and Caffa. Valuable details are also contained in the missionary sources of the Franciscans preaching the gospel within the Golden Horde. For its part, the Franciscan information is useful to compare with that found in Rus’ian sources regarding the relations of Catholic and Orthodox prelates with the Khan of the Golden Horde. Research novelty: This study highlights that the use of Franciscan sources appears to be extremely useful to complement the analysis of the relationship of the Genoese entrepôt of Caffa with the local authorities. Research results: An analysis of the conflict between the Genoese and the local authorities, along with the conditions of their return negotiated with the new Khan of the Golden Horde, reveals the obvious fact that Caffa, having undoubtedly grown in the Golden Horde period due to the activities of the Genoese immigrants, had to recognize its submission to the Jöchid rulers from its very foundation. The Genoese administration likewise recognized this dependence during the restoration of Caffa in the first years of Özbeg Khan’s reign.

Bactrian χϸονο ‘(calendar) year, (regnal) year’

Since H. Humbach's Baktrische Sprachdenkmäler (Wiesbaden, 1966) the main etymological proposal for Bactrian χϸονο ‘(calendar) year, (regnal) year’ has been A. Thierfelder's suggestion of a loanword from Hellenistic Greek χρόνος ‘time’. In this article the plausibility of this etymology is re-examined, and it is further argued that it should be rejected on the grounds that the formal phonological differences between the potential Hellenistic Greek source form and its presumable loan-adaptation form in Bactrian are inconsistent with what is known of Bactrian diachronic phonology.

The Syrohexapla

This chapter gives an overview of the main issues concerning the Syrohexapla. It discusses what is known about its origin and what can be said about its Greek source text(s) based on both the colophons and on textual studies. The chapter looks at the Syrohexapla first as a translation in its own right reflecting the features of ‘mirror translation’ and the translation’s original purpose. However, for LXX scholars the Syrohexapla is particularly interesting for its connection to the Hexapla. Therefore the chapter summarizes the research on the Syrohexapla’s text and on the marginalia’s role and value as text-critical witnesses to the Hexapla and to the Hexaplaric recension.

Der Heros und die starken Frauen

ZusammenfassungThis paper takes a critical look at how the first German translation of Homer – Simon Schaidenreisser’s Odyssea from the sixteenth century – deals with the identity-forming categories of gender and divinity. The shifts in power structures within these categories, which occur in the transcultural target language-oriented translation, are examined in an intersectional analysis. For this purpose, the translation is contrasted with the Latin translation of the Odyssey by Raphael Volaterranus (1534), Schaidenreisser’s direct source, as well as with Homer’s Greek source text. The subjects of this analysis are the two powerful, antagonistic, female divinities of the Odyssey: Circe and Calypso. The paper illustrates how the depiction of the goddesses is reshaped in the Early Modern cultural context of the translation and how power structures shift within the narrative, resulting in a loss of power and intersectional complexity for the goddesses and a re-evaluation of the narrative’s hero, Ulysses.

Catullus 6.17

This article defends Baehrens’ reading cenam for caelum at Catullus 6.17 as more sensible than scholars have thought, based on allusions to Meleager, AP 5.175. It then proposes a new emendation to the line that is suggested by this Greek source.

A Forgotten Translingual Pioneer: Elizaveta Kul’man and her Self-Translated Poetry

Elizaveta Borisovna Kul’man (1808-1825) is a unique figure in the history of Russian literature, or more precisely, the history of Russian, German, and Italian literature. A child prodigy with formidable linguistic gifts, Kul’man stands out both with her polyglot prowess and outsized literary productivity. At the time of her premature death at age seventeen, Kul’man left behind a vast unpublished oeuvre in multiple languages. The edition of her works published by the Imperial Russian Academy in 1833 contains a trilingual compendium of hundreds of parallel poems written in Russian, German, and Italian. The writing of poetic texts in three languages simultaneously makes Kul’man an early practitioner of what has been called “synchronous self-translation”. Not only are the poems linked horizontally as mutual translations of each other, they also pose as translations of a fictitious Greek source. Kul’man thus combines translation, self-translation, and pseudo-translation into a unified whole. This article discusses the genesis of Kul’man’s translingualism and explores her trilingual poetics in more detail by following the metamorphosis of one particular poem through its incarnations in Russian, German and Italian. It argues that Kul’man’s translingual creativity anticipates more recent developments in twentieth and twenty-first-century poetry produced by globally dispersed Russians.

A Nativity Sermon in the 13th Century Tolstovskiy Sbornik: Textology and Language Features

The paper focuses on the composition, lexical, and grammatical features of a Nativity sermon in the 13 th century Old Russian Tolstovskiy Sbornik (National Library of Russia, F.p.I.39). The author considers its Byzantine sources, principles of editorial work, and the differences from original rhetorical structures. Attributed to John Chrysostom, the sermon turns out to be a complicated compilation from various early Byzantine sermons. The compilation is based both on rearranging fragments of the same source and on combining excerpts from different sermons in a small context. Such transformations indicate the lack of cohesion in sermon texts, due to their independence from the causation and time factor. Non-attributed parts of the Old Russian text may be original since they demonstrate a certain similarity with Kirill Turovskiy orations in the same anthology. The lexical level of the sermon contains non-standard solutions that reinterpret the Greek source text, which may indicate either the missionary nature of the translation or a tendency to the poetic decoration. In some cases, the semantic mismatch of lexical units within Greek-Slavonic correlations is due to errors. At the grammatical level, there are also grammatical inconsistencies of Slavonic and Greek units; they affect the categories of time, number, gender, as well as parts-of-speech status.