On the Genesis Problem of the Slavonic Ecclesiastical Poetry: the Transmission of the Poetic Devices in the Early Ecclesiastical Slavonic Translation of the Hymnography

The present paper deals with the process of formation of the poetic devices of the Ecclesiastical Slavonic language and literature. Specifically the problems of the transmission of the poetic devices in the process of the translation of Byzantine hymnography to Ecclesiastical Slavonic were discussed. The investigation was performed on the material of the translations of two Byzantine hymns: the Akathistos Hymn and the Alphabetic Stichera from the Great Canon service. Both texts were studied diachronically by the comparative analyses of the variants from different text versions dating from 10^th up to the 14^th century. This approach helps to verify the attitude of the Medieval Slavic scholars towards the certain phenomena, as well as to provide the more complex picture. Two specific poetic devices were studied - the primary sound repetition (paronomasia) and the secondary sound repetition (paregnemon). Comparing the rates of the transmission of there devices one can easily see that while the paronomacia is almost never transmitted in the translation, nor taken into account in the following text corrections, the paregnemon is transmitted in more than 50 % cases in the initial translation and the following corrections made over the text by redactors increased this number. More often was transmitted the paregnemon which has to do with the root or the prefix repetition, while the one which has to do with the suffix and/ or flexion repetition is transmitted only when it is combined with the syntactic parallelism. The results of our investigation definitely prove that to the Slavic scholar, only the poetic devices which involved either semantics or syntax were of any importance, while whatever pertained to the domain of phonetics seemed to have not played an important role in the proper transmission of the whole message of the text. This results would definitely help us to understand the main characteristics of the Ecclesiastic Slavonic poetics of the primary period (11^th - 14^th century) from the point of view of the contemporary with it scholars.

Keywords: Ecclesiastical Slavonic translations, poetic devices, hymnography, Akathistos Hymn, Stichera, paronomasia, paregnemon.

On the Genesis Problem of the Slavonic Ecclesiastical Poetry: the Transmission of the Poetic Devices in the Early Ecclesiastical Slavonic Translation of the Hymnography