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READER'S INTRODUCTION |
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This poem is a paraphrase, in verse, of the Gospel of
John. It was written in Greek, in the Fifth Century, by Nonnos of Panopolis, probably in Alexandria, Egypt, during the last days of the Western Roman Empire. Of the writer, nothing is known. The date of composition is
not known. For the purposes of this project, the date is set arbitrarily at 450 A.D. The poem was published in a Latin translation in 1501 by Aldo Manuzio, in Venice. It was translated into
French in 1861 by Marie Louis Jean Andrea Charles Demartin du Tyrac, comte de Marcellus (1795 - 1865). It was published in a German translation in 1985. This is the first published verse translation into English. Nonnos took the 21 Chapters of the Gospel of John, which was written in the common Greek of the day, called Koine, and paraphrased them into the formal language of Homeric epic, in a style nearly
1000 years old at the time. This was a literary tour de force, which might be the equivalent of turning the Gospel into a big screen blockbuster today, along the lines of King of Kings, or Ben Hur.
Nonnos revived the ancient epic style of poetry for this purpose. At the time of Nonnos, the differences in quantity of Greek vowels was disappearing, and it is significant that he not only constructed hexameters
with correct quantities himself, but even found a following, notably, Triphiodorus and Colluthus. This translation is an attempt to give the same effect in English as the original would have
given to a reader at the time. That is, it is formal, metric, somewhat archaic in style, and calling upon old stylistic clichés both for the purposes of the meter and the paraphrastic descriptions. Nonnos was perhaps
trying to make a version of the Gospel which would be acceptable the literary virtuosi of late pagan empire, who would no doubt turn up their educated noses at the plain narrative style of the Gospel text. Some experts dispute the attribution of this poem to the same poet who wrote the other poem associated with Nonnos, the Dionysiaca. That poem has enjoyed more currency, and exists in an English
translation by W.H.D. Rouse, published by Loeb Classics, the classicists' Hit Parade. However, there are numerous word usages which appear to be unique to the two poems, sufficient to satisfy Occam's razor.
This translation is made principally from the Scheindler Edition of 1881, although the translator has also relied on the Marcellus Edition of 1861 for certain words choices |
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Paraphrase of the Gospel of John by Nonnos of Panopolis Translated from the Greek by M.A. Prost Copyright © M.A. Prost, 1999 Web design by: |
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