Friday, April 17, 2009

Conférence du p. Macaire sur la vie monastique

Those who can understand French are encouraged to listen to this lecture on the monastic life, given at the Institut de théologie orthodoxe Saint-Serge in Paris on April 19, 2009, by Hieromonk Markarios, a native of France who has been a monk at the Monastery of Simonos Petra, Mount Athos, for thirty years. Many of you may in fact have his books on your shelves: he is the author of The Synaxarion: The Lives of the Saints of the Orthodox Church (read the introduction here).

12 comments:

Matthew said...

I can't seem to get this link to work.

Felix Culpa said...

Thanks, fixed.

For some reason I've been having trouble linking lately.

Matthew said...

I'm trying to coax a certain French girl into translating this for us next week. She didn't agree to offer it publicly but would do it for me privately. We'll see how it goes.

Felix Culpa said...

Sounds dangerous!

If she were to transcribe it, I'd be willing to translate it.

Matthew said...

She might be more willing if that was the case. I think she just needs a bit more encouragement. She does a very fine job. She's been working on Jean-Claude Larchet's "Saint Silouane de l’Athos" but gets bogged down and discouraged with various technical difficulties as well as the erudition of some other translator's. We'll see how it goes. Maybe we can send you off the first chapter that she's translated.

Felix Culpa said...

I'd need to have the French in front of me to do that properly.

That said, Larchet was probably working from the Russian (or a French translation of the Russian). So turning that into English would mean producing an English translation of a French translation of the Russian. There's certainly the chance of something getting lost in the process!

Matthew said...

Thanks for that last bit. I wasn't aware that this might be third hand.

Felix Culpa said...

Simply that all we have by St Silouan himself was written in Russian, and all we have first-hand about St Silouan comes through Fr Sophrony (Sakharov), who was also writing in Russian. Fr Sophrony's book "St Silouan the Athonite," which exists in English translation, contains essentially everything we have both by and about St Silouan.

That said, I'd certainly be interested in Larchet's commentary. One short article by Larchet on St Silouan can be found here:

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jim_forest/Silouan.htm

Becoming said...

The French lady corrects us. The book is Jean-Claude Larchet's "Saint Silouane de l’Athos" Cerf and is not the translation from Archimandrite Sophrony. She says what Larchet's thesis is is how St. Silouan's teaching of "keep your mind in hell and despair not" is in the ascetical and mystical tradition of the Orthodox Church while being expressed in an "original and universal way which applies to the fears, expectations and needs of 20th century man." The second part of the book contains previous unpublished texts which include letters from the last week of St. Silouan's" life (back cover).

Matthew said...

Matthew is Becoming

Felix Culpa said...

Right, I'm not saying that Larchet is a translation of Fr Sophrony. Simply that anything in there by St Silouan would originally have been written in Russian, so in translating any of his words one would be doing a translation of a translation.

Matthew said...

Je comprends