The Creed for the Ukrainians and Poles: linguocultural histories of texts

Abstract

The paper is dedicated to the retranslations of the Creed which, in the textual perspective, have to deal with two branches of religious translation: liturgical and biblical. The Creed is the fundamental text of Eastern and Western Christianity, that is why it has a long history of retranslations in Ukraine and Poland. The scope of the analysis covers two variants of the Creed: the Apostles’ Creed and the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed which share some phrasing. The novelty of the paper lies in the astonishing fact that these texts have been studied scrupulously by theologians, but no translation critic and historian have ever considered these texts seriously from the viewpoints of societal history and textual criticism. The methodology of historiographical description and textual analysis is applied to elucidate and validate the historical dynamics and reception of retranslated texts. Historiographical analysis involves the interpretive study of vocabulary from the point of view of semantics, language history and sociolinguistics, which allow to characterize the reasons and effects of textual and lexical diversity. The theoretical significance of this academic enterprise lies in the application of its outcome for the literary and cultural histories of Ukraine and Poland, especially for the situation when religious texts were the best tools of nation-shaping and state-building. Typologically, the conditions of supporting the search for a new text in the target language can be grouped in four clusters: political reasons, social motives, cultural life and historical background. The history of translation shows how important the preservation and elaboration of cultural codes is for the perception of believers and for the education and evangelization of the nation. The prospects of this study include the ecclesiastical values and societal ideals of other prayers for private, public and monastic worshipping. Besides, a motivating topic is the acceptable limits of a translator’s licence and lingual experimenting which are usually feared because of possible misinterpretations and heresies, though they can offer more successful equivalents for overcoming numerous linguistic pitfalls in religious discourse.