05 — The Translator
The largest single share of Ware’s working life went not into books of his own but into putting other people’s texts into English: the complete Philokalia from the Greek, with G. E. H. Palmer and Philip Sherrard; and the two great liturgical books of the Orthodox year, with Mother Mary of Bussy-en-Othe. Measured by pages, by labour, and arguably by consequence, this is the centre of his achievement.
Tradition: Orthodox (Britain; Ecumenical Patriarchate)
What This Section Covers
- The English Philokalia — the Palmer–Sherrard–Ware translation, its collaborators, its glossary, the forty-four-year span from volume 1 to volume 5, and Ware’s own scholarship on the anthology.
- The Festal Menaion and the Lenten Triodion — the liturgical translations, Ware’s long introductions on the meaning of a feast and the meaning of the Great Fast, and the liturgical English they established.
The Scale of It
| Work | Collaborators | Publisher | Dates |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Festal Menaion | Mother Mary; foreword by Georges Florovsky | Faber and Faber, London | 1969 |
| The Lenten Triodion | Mother Mary | Faber and Faber, London | 1978 (© 1977) |
| The Lenten Triodion: Supplementary Texts | Mother Mary | St Tikhon’s Seminary Press | later |
| The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vols. 1–5 | G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard | Faber and Faber, London | 1979, 1981, 1984, 1995, 2023 |
Together these amount to several thousand pages of primary text — the entire fixed festal cycle, the entire Lenten and Holy Week cycle, and the whole of the Greek Philokalia — rendered into an English that could be read in church, quoted in a book, and used as the base text of a subsequent literature. Before this work, an English reader had almost none of it; after it, effectively all of it.
A Note on Method
Two decisions govern the whole body of translation. First, Ware translated from the Greek — from the Venice Philokalia of 1782 and from the Greek liturgical books — rather than from the Slavonic or the Russian, which had been the route of the earlier partial English selections. Second, he supplied apparatus: introductions, notes, and in the case of the Philokalia a glossary of technical terms that had no settled English equivalents. The intention throughout was to give the reader the text itself and the means to understand it, not a devotional paraphrase.
See Also
- Section 03 — Patmos and the Monastic Vocation — the living hesychast milieu behind the Philokalia work
- Section 06 — His Theology — the doctrine these texts carry
- The Philokalia — the collection itself
- The Twelve Great Feasts — the festal cycle of the Menaion
- The Psalter and the Daily Office — the wider liturgical books
References
- Palmer, G. E. H., Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, trans. The Philokalia: The Complete Text Compiled by St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth. 5 vols. London: Faber and Faber, 1979, 1981, 1984, 1995, 2023.
- The Festal Menaion. Trans. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos (Timothy) Ware. Foreword by Georges Florovsky. London: Faber and Faber, 1969.
- The Lenten Triodion. Trans. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1978; repr. South Canaan, PA: St Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 2002.
- Ware, Kallistos. “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia.” In The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, ed. Brock Bingaman and Bradley Nassif, 9–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.