Translating Hagiographic Church Slavonic Words: Problems and Proposals

Abstract

To understand and translate speech expressed through the language of culture correctly, you need adequate knowledge of philology, etymology and the history of the language, as well as the ability to find your way around the civil and ecclesiastical history of Rus’ and Russia. Lacking any specific glossaries and dictionaries in Italian with which to translate the religious and philosophical- theological vocabulary, you have to consult general dictionaries, which frequently fail to provide satisfactory solutions, or monolingual dictionaries written in languages different from Italian. While waiting for a bilingual (Russian-Italian, Italian-Russian) lexicon of religious and philosophical-theological words, it seems appropriate to start analyzing certain lexemes, recurring in specific literary genres, in order to reconstruct their origins, semantics and use. This study analyzes certain lemmas of hagiographic Church Slavonic vocabulary, in particular: pravednj, prepodobnyj, jurodivyj, podvig