Translation and Transformation of John Chrysostom’s Urban Imagery into Old Church Slavonic

Abstract

John Chrysostom was not only one of the most prolific and influential authors of late antiquity but also a renown preacher, exegete, and public figure. His homilies and sermons combined the classical rhetorical craft with some vivid imagery from everyday life. He used descriptions, comparisons, and metaphors that were both a rhetorical device and a reference to the real world familiar to his audience. From 9th century onwards, many of Chrysostom’s works were translated into Old Church Slavonic and were widely used for either private or communal reading. Even if they had lost the spontaneity of the oral performance, they still preserved the references to the 4th-century City, to the streets and the homes in a distant world, transferred into the 10th-century Bulgaria and beyond. The article examines how some of these urban images were translated and sometimes adapted to the medieval Slavonic audience, how the realia and the figures of speech were rendered into the Slavonic language and culture. It is a survey on the reception of the oral sermon put into writing, and at the same time, it is a glimpse into the late antique everyday life in the Eastern Mediterranean.