Клонки от „родословното дърво“ на някои старобългарски съчинения
Branches of the “Family Tree” of Some Slavonic Texts

Summary/Abstract: BRANCHES OF THE ‘FAMILY TREE’ OF SOME SLAVONIC TEXTS MARIJA SPASOVA (VELIKO TĂRNOVO) (Summary) The paper raises the question whether the similarity of motifs and expressions in texts translated from Greek and texts composed directly in Slavonic in the ninth and tenth centuries does not betray more than merely the general erudition of the authors of the latter. It examines the metaphor of the ‘busy bee’ in three homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus and the Catena to Mt 9:1–8 (Gospel Homiliary, 26) and in the verse Eulogy to Tsar Symeon. Detailed examination of the lexical and morphological features of the five texts reveals that the translation of the Catena and the composition also must have had first-hand knowledge of the Slavonic translation of the homilies of St Gregory. The expression ‘easier to do smth. than the opposite’, which occurs in the treatise On the Letters (13:8–9) appears to be directly derived from the translation of St Gregory’s Funeral Oration for Basil the Great. And the description of the palaces of Preslav in John the Exarch’s Hexameron, 6, outright paraphrases its source, St. Gregory’s homily On the Love of the Poor. It might be presumed that both authors have participated in the translation of the Greek collection of 16 homilies of St. Gregory. These and other ‘incrustations’ in early Slavonic texts should be considered pointers to the training of the authors, for at this early stage erudition is more likely to have been acquired hands-on, i.e. in translation, than by mere reading.

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