Telling Parallel Translations from Retranslations in Byzantine-Slavic Hagiography

The present paper addresses the problem of telling independent translations from later retranslations. Though telling these apart forms part and parcel of the practice of Paleoslavic text research, up to this date no effort has been made to formulate a generally applicable methodology of going about this task. Sound intuition and personal reading experience are still the standard to go by. In this paper an outline is provided of what such a methodology could look like, suggesting and discussing a set of basic criteria for distinguishing what we term parallel against retranslations. This will be done based on the Slavonic Life of Eupraxia, for which alternate renderings pointing to starkly different text versions have been registered. This paper will take the cards on Eupraxia from Francis Thomson’s cartotheca as a point of departure and start with a discussion of the translations identified on his EUPRAXIA cards.