Thoughts on Formatting a Book: Part 2

Brian Glass 1 Comment

In my previous post on this topic, I briefly evaluated a number of options that self-publishers use to format a book. In this post, I will describe how I used Latex and a few other open-source tools to format An Explanation of the Book of Judith.

As previously mentioned, I used Google Docs as my word processor. I did this because I wanted to make the document open to collaboration. You can still read the entire book in the original Google document. Getting the book into Latex format required the use of Pandoc, which is a very powerful document conversion tool. The conversion was not perfect and I also wanted to break it up into separate files for each chapter, so I wrote a Python script along with TexSoup to break it up and make a few systematic changes to the document. For instance, I automatically inserted non-breaking spaces between the names of Bible books and chapter numbers so that Bible references wouldn’t be broken up across separate lines. I continued using Google Docs as the authoritative document, repeatedly exporting the DOCX and running the various steps on the export using a Makefile.

Getting the Latex document formatted to my liking was a fairly arduous process. Latex is fairly arcane, so if you are not a software engineer or mathematician, you are likely to run away screaming in terror once you catch a glimpse of it. However, it is a long-standing standard for creating papers and other publications in certain areas of the academic world. I used it back in the early ’90s to write a thesis. The key to using Latex well is separating formatting from the content itself. For instance, rather than making scripture excerpts bold, I created a macro called bibleverse to demarcate those portions from the rest of the text. In that macro, I set the text to be bold. However, if I wanted to change the style to use italic text for the scripture excerpts, I would simply change the macro and the entire document would change. Below is example code from the beginning of chapter 2.

\chapter{The Campaign of Holofernes}
\vskipnextgrid
\begin{bibleverse}
\dropcap{I}{n} the thirteenth year of the reign of
Nabuchodonosor, the two and twentieth day of the first month, the word
was given out in the house of Nabuchodonosor king of the Assyrians, that
he would revenge himself. \versenum{2} And he called all the ancients, and all the
governors, and his officers of war, and communicated to them the secret
of his counsel: \versenum{3} And he said that his thoughts were to bring all the
earth under his empire.
\end{bibleverse}
What does it mean that Nabuchodonosor, full of fury and elevated
by the pride of arrogance, promises to avenge himself upon those who
kept resisting him and boasts that he wants to bring the whole earth
under his authority if it is not that the devil, blinded by his own
pride, promises himself dominion over the entire globe and strives with
all his might to create accomplices in his impiety who have been seduced
away from pious worship?
Bragging about the power of his reign at one point—according
to the prophet's statement—he spoke this way in his heart in the
figure of the king of Babylon, saying, “I will ascend into heaven, I
will exalt my throne above the stars of God, I will sit in the mountain
of the covenant, in the sides of the north. I will ascend above the
height of the clouds, I will be like the most High'' (Isa~14:13–14).
And in the Gospel, drawing our Redeemer out onto a very high
mountain, he reveals all the kingdoms of the world and their glory and
says to him, “All these will I give thee, if falling down thou wilt
adore me'' (Matt~4:9). Indeed, his arrogance has no measure, but being
infirm, does have a certain downfall that will become clear in the end.
view raw example.tex hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The above code produces the page on the right.

By the end of my book formatting process, I had developed a complete Latex style. And wouldn’t you know it, that style has turned out to be handy for my next project (which I will introduce later). Because this worked out so well, I’ve decided to skip Google Docs altogether and use Latex directly for this new project. I no longer have to worry about how to format the next commentary. I simply type in the content and run Latex on it.

For the book cover, I used a combination of Gimp and Scribus. Scribus is a little awkward on a Mac but is the best option if you are looking to keep your costs low. It was sufficient since I only used it for the book cover. I’ve used Gimp on and off for many years, so I was able to put something together fairly quickly for the front, learning just enough about Scribus to lay out the whole spread and typeset the blurb on the back cover and the spine.

Paschal Homily of Rabanus Maurus

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Note: I don’t know if this is a homily written by the Blessed Rabanus Maurus himself, or just one he added to his collection of homilies, but it seemed very appropriate to translate it and make it available as we quickly approach Pascha.

Our Pascha, dearly beloved, is the resurrection of Christ, for Pascha means a passing over, clearly from death to life, from passion to glory, from Hades to Paradise. For, in that Christ died, our death was destroyed; in that He arose, He granted us the means of arising and made us cross over from infidelity to the Catholic Faith, from idolatry to the worship of the One God, from sin to righteousness, from error to truth, from discord to peace, from useless servants sold into slavery to the devil to being counted among the children of God, from exile to the homeland, from punishment to a crown.

And therefore, dearly beloved, the Pascha of Christ is the Kingdom of Heaven, the salvation of the world, the death of Hades, the glory of Heaven, the life of believers, the resurrection of the dead, the evidence of divine compassion, the price of human redemption, and the abolition of death’s sorrow. This feast, by a holy mystery of God, through the angels reveals, through the people manifests, and through the good hearts of believers multiplies the power of the Lord’s resurrection. So this is that day that the Psalmist once foretold, saying, “This is the day which the Lord hath made: let us be glad and rejoice therein” (Ps 117:24); higher than everything, brighter than all things, on which the Lord arose; on which, as you can see, He acquired a new people for himself through the spirit of regeneration; on which He imbued the minds of each one with joy and exultation. Therefore, this day of the resurrection of Christ is life for the dead, pardon for sinners, and glory for the saints.

How, then, does the Virgin Mary, the Mother of the Lord, retain first place among all women, and likewise this feast day is the chief among all days on earth? Just as we read the “Holy of Holies” or the “Song of Songs” in the Scriptures, we rightly call this the solemnity of solemnities.

Only Christ with the thief opened that fiery spear and door of paradise that no one could break open (Gen 3:24). The gate of paradise, which no one before the Passion of the Lord uncovered, has been both closed and open from the time when the Lord suffered until the present day; it is closed to sinners and unbelievers; it is open for the righteous and believers. Through it, the Apostle Peter entered; through it, the Apostle Paul entered; through it, all the holy martyrs entered; through it, the souls of the righteous from the whole world daily enter.

However, there are two gates: the gate of Paradise and the gate of the Church. We entered through the gate of the Church first, through faith and baptism, because we will certainly enter the gate of paradise after our exit from life if we faithfully continue laboring well. Without a doubt, the Holy Church is the house of God, and so we ought to live in such a way that we are not cast out of that house; cast forth and devoured by wild beasts, which are evil spirits. The prophet says of this, “Deliver not up to beasts,” oh Lord, “the souls that confess to thee” (Ps 73:19). Therefore, let us constantly dwell in her who is our mother the Church so that we may deserve to reach the kingdom of the eternal Father; the Father for whom she gave birth to us who are children by adoption.

Let us celebrate this holiest of solemnities as the Apostle Paul taught us, saying, “not with the old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness” (1 Cor 5:8), in other words, not in the bitterness of human malice, but in the sincerity of divine holiness, which is chastity, humility, goodness, compassion, kindness, righteousness, gentleness, patience, truth, peace, and generosity. This is the dough of Christian sanctity, which is corrupted by the leaven of human wickedness, which is lust, arrogance, envy, unfairness, greed, intemperance, lying, bickering, hatred, vainglory, cruelty, and injustice. It causes all alien kinds of corruption for us, and yet the sincerity of His truth in us is kept safe by Him, the author and bestower of all good things and the originator of this holiest of feasts, Jesus Christ, our Savior, who lives and reigns with God the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God throughout all the ages of ages.

Amen.

Thoughts on Formatting a Book

Brian Glass 4 Comments

Most of the thoughts I share on this blog are related to the Orthodox Faith. I’m going to diverge a bit and talk a little bit about my experience formatting a book for self-publishing.

As anyone who has followed this project knows, I have used Google Docs as my word processor, because I wanted the process to be public and I wanted people to be able to contribute. I had at least one extremely helpful person (hat tip to Diego) so I would consider this approach to be a success.

When I first set out to publish this book, I figured formatting would be pretty straightforward. It seemed that there was always some new tool showing up and things were getting easier by the day, so I didn’t bother too much about it. When the time came, I had done a little digging around and had a few software packages or services on my short list that I planned to try. I found a few others as I dug deeper. The list of tools I ended up trying or at least strongly considering were:

Before I give you my reasons for rejecting every one of these, I’ll cut to the chase and tell you that I ended up using a very old technology called LaTeX. I used LaTeX to write papers in college in the early ’90s, and it had already been around for a while then.

Vellum

I had been watching Vellum for years and was hoping that it would be the one. It’s not exactly cheap, but it seemed to be one of the most rubust and well respected tools available. Alas, it (last I checked) still does not support footnotes. It does support endnotes, but that was a dealbreaker for me. If you are writing a novel (which is what Vellum is geared toward), this won’t be an issue for you.

Apple Pages

Pages was actually pretty decent, and I got a long way with it. But as I was digging deeper, I found that it cannot create print-ready PDFs that a company like Ingram-Spark requires. This would have been OK for starters because my initial plan was to start only on Amazon and then eventually expand to Ingram, Lulu, or similar. But what I didn’t want to have to do was reformat the book multiple times in different software, so I set Pages aside and went on to another candidate.

Scrivener

I tried out Scrivener once many years ago. It seemed very complex and geared more toward the process of writing than formatting a book. I had already done that part, so half of the software was of no use to me. I didn’t try it again this round. Many reviewers seemed to think it was overly complex and hard to use.

Reedsy

Reedsy seemed so promising at first. I tried it off and on over the last several years and it kept getting better. But it seemed to plateau at one point and it plateaued before it got to where I needed it to get. First, it only offers three styles and no custom font choices. I could have lived with that since one of the choices was Crimson Text, which I would have settled for (I ended up using EB Garamond). However, it had other deficiencies. It doesn’t support tables, and I have two appendices with rather large tables in them. Likewise, I couldn’t bend it to my will enough to allow me to set off the scripture readings from the commentary in a way I was happy with. I think Reedsy would be a great place to write a first novel, but it’s not sufficient for more academic pursuits.

Papyrus Author

I went a long way with this tool. It seemed to have a lot of potential and power and was probably capable of formatting the book in a way I would have found acceptable. But in the end, it had a fatal flaw that scared me away. The first time it crashed, I thought I’d give it a second chance. But it told me to save my work in another file and restart, which made me very nervous. This is a book I just spent hours formatting. I don’t want to do it all over again. The second time it crashed, I uninstalled it. I simply couldn’t trust it to safely handle my words. It seems like a decent piece of software but is obviously not very robust. Note that I was using the unpaid version, not the paid version. I am also using a Mac, so your mileage may vary on other platforms.

Scribus

Scribus felt very clumsy running on a Mac. I finally figured out how to set the mouse speed so I could actually scroll, but it’s still very awkward. This is a tool that is modeled after full-fledged desktop publishing applications like InDesign, which is what I understand many publishing houses use. So I figured this might be the one. But after watching some videos on YouTube and learning what a manual process book layout is in one of these tools, I was simply astounded that this is how it’s done. I’m a software engineer. All good software engineers are lazy. We automate boring tasks that we don’t like to do over and over again so that we don’t have to do them over and over again. Maybe I’m missing something, but if this is the type of tool that has to be used, I’ll just have to pay someone to do it for me.

I did use Scribus for the cover. It supports conversion to CMYK and the generation of print-ready PDFs, so that was helpful. And it’s much better at formatting text than the Gimp, so the text on the back cover and the spine were done by Scribus while the background, cover art, and front title text and effects were done with Gimp. While better than Gimp at formatting text, it still doesn’t do as nice a job as LaTeX.

Atticus

Atticus cost more than I wanted to pay, but I was getting tired of trying out software, so I coughed up the $150 or so and gave it a spin. It feels a smidge like Reedsy with less polish but a bit more power. This could also be a good place to write novels, but Atticus does not support tables, which as I mentioned above was a showstopper for me. I sent an email to customer support and they promptly refunded my money without any questions. This seems like a decent platform, but again, not sufficient for a more academically focused book.

Affinity Publisher

I strongly considered buying a copy of Affinity Publisher after I found Scribus to be so clunky. However, I figured it would be more of the same manual process I had experienced with Scribus, so I didn’t bother. I will note that if I do need a professional desktop publishing system like InDesign someday, this is what I will buy. I refuse to pay the Adobe tax.

To be Continued…

That’s enough for one round. I will add some detail on my experience using LaTeX in a later post.

Judith Commentary in Paperback and Kindle

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At long last, An Explanation of the Book of Judith is now available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle ebook formats.

Here is the blurb from the back of the book.

Discover the captivating tale of Judith, brought to life in this medieval commentary – the earliest complete commentary on this often ignored book of the Bible. Translated for the first time into English, it interprets the courageous heroine’s story in the tradition of the early Church Fathers.

Delve into the complexities of Judith’s character, her unconventional strategy, and the moral and theological themes woven throughout her narrative. Heavily influenced by important figures in the early Church such as Saint Gregory the Great and Saint Jerome, the Blessed Rabanus Maurus illuminates the enduring significance of Judith’s story, making it a worthy addition to any scholar’s library and an enlightening read for all who seek wisdom from the ancient Church.

(Note that, by the time I got to the blurb, I was tired of writing and asked ChatGPT to write one for me. It needed a few tweaks, but it was pretty close. Note that this is the only part of the book that was written by AI. Maybe marketers can be replaced with AI?)

I was ready to publish it at the beginning of the year but ended up spending the next three and a half months figuring out how to typeset it, design the layout and cover, and then of course I had to read it over again on paper and make another two passes for very minor edits. For some reason, books are just better on paper and I noticed things on paper that I hadn’t noticed on a computer.

The book will remain available on this blog for free and is still licensed under the Creative Commons, so it can be used freely for non-commercial use. That said, the paperback, and even the Kindle version, are much nicer to read than the Google Docs version available here. Oh, and if I sell enough copies, my wife might let me work on more translations in the future!

A Lenten Lesson in Humility

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As anyone who reads this blog knows, I have been working on a translation of a commentary on the Book of Judith for many years. Not only that, I am nearly ready to self-publish it on Amazon. I have made at least 5 editing passes over the manuscript and feel fairly confident in its accuracy and readability. To qualify that, I will also make it clear that it will never be perfect. Every time I look at it I find something that needs correction or could be improved. But at this point, I will not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

One of the reasons I chose to translate this particular book was that it had never been translated before and was completely unavailable in English. Not to mention, it is the only pre-schism commentary on the book of Judith available. I was looking for a project that would help me to learn Latin better, but also bring me a bit of glory in the fact that I would be the first to publish this commentary.

Sunday morning, before heading out to Church, I was tinkering with it a bit on Amazon KDP to see how my latest changes looked. I made some tweaks and decided to check and see if it might already be listed in pre-release state on the main Amazon site. What I found there shocked me. I had searched many times over the years to see if anyone else was doing work on this book but had never found anyone. Sunday morning there it was, a new translation of the commentary by Rabanus Maurus on the books of Ruth, Esther, and Judith, published 4 days ago by a company that had been formed last year. Not only that, but they published it just a few days before I had been planning to. My jaw about hit the floor. I had wanted to not only be the first, but the only “expert” to publish this book.

(Not to sell myself too short and also to brag a little, I was still the first to complete a translation of the book. You’ll note that I announced the completion of the first draft in 2020, and it has been available online in its entirety at every step of the editing process.)

I frittered away about this the entire 40-minute drive to Church. On this particular Sunday, our priest was out sick and our Deacon was presiding over a Typica service. It was the Sunday of Saint John Climicus, so at the end of the service, Deacon Andrew read a portion of The Ladder of Divine Ascent. It happened to be the section on vainglory, and let me tell you, that reading drilled right into my soul. That reading was for me.

The timing of these events was far too coincidental to be happenstance. This event reminds me of the prayer of Saint Philaret of Moscow, particularly the line that says, “When unforeseen things occur, let me not forget that all is sent by Thee.” I prayed many years ago that God would help me to overcome my vainglory. When God answers prayer, it may take many years and you may not like the outcome, but he will respond. God knows how to arrange things in such a way that the lesson will be learned effectively. I could have rejected what he was teaching me, but the way things came together made it easier to receive the outcome in peace and realize that if God wants something to be done, it will be done whether I do it or not. As the tagline says on my blog, “he’s just this guy, you know?” That’s it. I’m just this guy.

I offer hearty congratulations to my Brothers in Christ at Scriptorium Press for their new book, Saints of the Old Testament: Rabanus Maurus’ Commentary on Ruth, Judith, and Esther. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to order a copy.

Oh, and look for an upcoming post from me when my translation has been published on Amazon. There will be a paperback and a Kindle ebook available. Amazon is currently reviewing it and, assuming it passes muster, it should be available in a few days. And, as always, the full commentary continues to be available for free online for your reading pleasure.

Translation with Artificial Intelligence

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I’ve done some experimentation recently with some of the new Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems for processing language. More specifically, I have been experimenting ChatGPT, which is a “chat-bot” that leverages a large language model called GPT-3.5 that can “understand” human language in order to converse with humans. I’m not here to talk about the risks and dangers of AI, but in this case to discuss its utility in translating ancient documents, as I have been doing for several years. Did I just waste six years of hard work translating An Explanation of the Book of Judith?

I took a paragraph from the commentary and asked ChatGPT to translate it for me. The following Latin is what I provided to ChatGPT:

Quid est Judith “in eminentiorem locum ascendere” nisi sanctam ecclesiam ad superna et caelestia dogmata sermonem convertere, ut illuc nostros animos sustollat et ad laudandum Deum pro universis beneficiis suis, quae misericorditer vero impendit Israheli, torpentes provocet? Cuius virtus hostem antiquum interfecit in manu illius feminae, de qua ad callidum serpentem in primordio Dominus ait: “Ipsa conteret caput eius.” Et cui ipsa Veritas in evangelio ait: “Ecce dabo vobis potestatem calcandi super serpentes et scorpiones, et super omnem virtutem inimici.”

My translation follows (Chapter 13, verse 22):

What does it mean that Judith goes up to a higher place, if it does not mean that the Holy Church shifts the discourse toward supernal and celestial doctrine to lift our spirits to that level and call forth our lethargic spirits to praise God for all their blessings that he most mercifully bestows upon Israel, the God whose power destroyed the ancient enemy by the hand of that woman about whom the Lord said to the cunning serpent in the beginning, “she shall crush thy head,” (Gn 3:15) and to whom the very Truth said in the Gospel, “Behold, I give you power to tread upon serpents and scorpions, and upon all the power of the enemy” (Lk 10:19).

ChatGPT responded with:

“What is it for Judith to ‘ascend to a higher place’ except to turn the holy church to discourse on the heavenly and celestial dogmas, so that she may lift our souls there and stir them up to praise God for all his merciful benefits, which he truly bestows on Israel, who were lethargic and disobedient? Whose virtue killed the ancient enemy in the hand of that woman, about whom the Lord said to the cunning serpent in the beginning, ‘She will crush your head.’ And to whom the Truth herself said in the gospel, ‘Behold, I give you power to tread upon serpents and scorpions, and upon all the power of the enemy.'”

Let’s compare these translations a bit. First, ChatGPT gets a Latin construct called an accusative-with-infinitive clause wrong near the beginning. Sanctam ecclesiam ad superna et caelestia dogmata sermonem convertere is translated, “to turn the holy church to discourse on the heavenly and celestial dogmas.” If you don’t understand this later construct found quite frequently in the writings of Rabanus Maurus, then ChatGPT’s response makes sense. But this construct turns things around a bit and makes a word that we’d normally expect to be a direct object into the subject of the clause. So Sanctam Ecclesiam is in the accusative case, but it acts as the subject in this clause rather than the direct object. The Holy Church does the turning (or convertere) of the discourse (or sermonem) rather than Judith turning the Church to this discourse.

Another interesting thing to point out is that ChatGPT translates ipsa Veritas into “the Truth herself.” This is actually technically correct. Veritas has feminine gender in Latin. ChatGPT doesn’t have the context of the scripture reference and consequently doesn’t know that the person making the quote in the Gospel of Luke is Christ himself, who is a man. So I, understanding that, avoid the issue by translating the phrase, “the very Truth.” ChatGPT’s translation here is more literal.

I also tried some other examples and found that ChatGPT does a pretty good job across the board, but makes enough mistakes at this time that I would be very careful in using it to translate Latin. It’s good enough to do a quick check on some ancient document to see what the author probably thought about a particular thing, but I wouldn’t depend on its translations for anything important. It does prove useful in exploring alternative phrasings and accelerating word choice during translation. I have been known to spend upwards of an hour choosing the appropriate word. ChatGPT pretty quickly gives you some good choices.

Will AI replace translators in the future? I don’t know, but it seems a lot more possible now than it did 5 year ago.

Orthocal.info Update

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I’d like to let you know about some updates to Orthocal.info and the Orthodox Daily Alexa Skill.

There are two main features that I’ve added to the site and the skill. First, both the skill and the site offer readings from the lives of the saints. These stories are taken by permission from abbamoses.com. Second is a full monthly calendar. In addition to some other minor changes, I’ve also added RSS feeds. If you use a feed reader like Feedly.com, this will give you convenient access to the readings. The monthly calendar can in theory be embedded in a website using oembed, but I haven’t tried it. It does validate on iframely.com’s validator. Contact me if you want to try it and I’ll work with you to get it into a usable state. I’m happy to work with folks on other embedding needs for parish websites or other use cases.

As always, the rubrics are based on OCA practice and don’t always line up with other jurisdictions. I wrote the original version of this site while I was attending an OCA church. I moved across the country and am now attending an Antiochian church. So… I do know that the readings aren’t always the same and that the fasting rules also vary a bit, but I haven’t built up the gumption to go through the lectionary and add support for the Byzantine lectionary. Maybe someday…

The code for the site was getting pretty stale. I originally wrote the site in Go in order to learn the Go language. However, in my day to day work, I didn’t end up using Go as I had expected. I wasn’t keeping up with the Go language (I use Python at work), and so I decided to rewrite the site in a language that’s easier for me to maintain and update. The site is now completely written in Python and Django. The source code for the site is open-source and freely available at https://github.com/brianglass/orthocal-python. The site is hosted using Google’s Firebase and Cloud Run. Hosting costs are pennies per month.

The main goal of the site has always been to power the Alexa Skill (secondarily to provide a RESTful API). I do know that Amazon has laid off a lot of its Alexa workforce, so I don’t know about the future longevity of the skill, but for now here it is. I did look into supporting the Google Home Assistant, but Google is shutting down Assistant’s conversational actions feature in favor of Android actions. I’m not an Android developer, so I’m hoping someone else will take a stab at that.

Judith: Update

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It has been a long time since I posted anything here. The translation and editing of An Explanation of the Book of Judith is ongoing. At present I am about 50% of the way through the commentary on my first editing pass. Readability is much improved as is translation accuracy.

This is just a quick post to let you know that I have enabled PDF download in the original Google Document, as well as published it in a more easily accessible web page form to make it easier to read online and to make it possible for Google to index it.

Judith: Commentary Translation Complete

Brian Glass 1 Comment

I am pleased to announce that I have completed the first draft of the translation of the Archbishop Hrabanus Maurus’s commentary on the book of Judith. As always, An Explanation of the Book of Judith is available freely online through Google Documents. I usually offer highlights on the chapter I most recently completed, but this chapter was so long that I’m going to forego that on this last chapter. But do feel free to provide feedback on the translation of Chapter 16. Feedback can be given directly in the document itself. You can simply highlight something and add a comment or edit the document itself to make suggestions.

This medieval commentary is the earliest full length commentary that we have on the book of Judith, and probably the only one that could be considered big-O Orthodox.

While this is a major milestone for me, four years in the making, I do want to make it clear that this is the first draft. So yes, if you are eager to get into the commentary and really dig into the book of Judith, you may certainly do that. But also realize that this work still requires a great deal of editing and double-checking for accuracy. The current draft should serve to get across the basic message that the blessed Hrabanus conveyed in his commentary, but there may be inaccuracies in the translation here and there and some of the wording may prove awkward to read.

The next phase of this project entails completing a todo list of some cleanup work including such things as formatting the bibliography and footnote entries correctly, thoroughly rereading the whole book, and probably quite a bit of rephrasing, especially of earlier chapters. My Latin skills improved immensely during the course of this project and later chapters are much better than earlier ones. I’ll take what I learned back to the earlier chapters to make them flow better and improve accuracy. I will also need to write a decent introduction to the author of the original work as well as a guide on how to use the book.

Finally, I do plan to self-publish. The book will continue to have a Creative Commons license and be available freely online. But I plan to make a printed edition and an eBook edition for those who prefer a physical copy or a copy formatted nicely for an ereader, as well as for those who would like to support further work of this nature through purchase.

Judith: Timbrels & Bagpipes

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A Goblet Drum (Source:Wikipedia)

In the course of translating ancient documents, I have found that there are numerous detours. A case in point is a bit of a dispute about what a timbrel actually is. What, after all, is a timbrel? Have you ever seen one? In his commentary on the book of Judith, Hrabanus raises this issue, since the book of Judith does mention a timbrel in Judith’s song.

The relevant passage is as follows (chapter 16, verse 4):

Certain people say that a timbrel (tympanum) is a musical instrument, “like two cones with only the points joined together; the sonorous reverberation is from the hide stretched over them. Musicians play it rhythmically with repeated resonance, beating with a measure of discipline.” [5] Others, however, say that the timbrel is a very small thing, by the fact that it can be carried in a woman’s hand, as it is written in Exodus, “So Mary the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand” (Ex 15:20); and also to be formed into a trumpet (tubam) with a single small pipe at the narrow end through which it is blown into, mystically signifying that the knowledge of the ancient law in the hand of the synagogue of the Jews from ancient times is the minimum, which was enlarged in the hands of the Holy Church only through Christ.

The first quote is from Cassiodorus’ commentary on the Psalms (PL70 1052D). Cassiodorus seems to be describing what is now called a goblet drum, which has been in use since ancient times in the middle east.

The second description was a bit more puzzling to me. Not only had I never imagined a timbrel to be a wind instrument, but a brass wind instrument was even further from my mind. The critical edition by Adele Simonetti that I am using is generally quite good at indicating citations of other works, but in this case it was unclear to me who “others” was.

It turns out that a pupil of Hrabanus Maurus, Walafrid Strabo, mentions this very thing (hat tip to Diego), noting that Jerome says that a timbrel is a type of trumpet: “According to Jerome it is a type of trumpet (tubae) having a reed or pipe on top, through which it returns a sonorous sound” (PL113 232C-D).

Jerome was the clue I was looking for. With a little googling, I came across a short letter to Dardanus from Saint Jerome on musical instruments. Modern scholars don’t believe this letter was actually written by Jerome himself and is thus falsely attributed to him. The author is generally referred to as Pseudo-Jerome. (At least one scholar argues that Hrabanus himself wrote the letter). It is pretty clear to me that our Hrabanus was referring to a passage from this letter and was not likely its author. A translation of the relevant passage follows:

The timbrel (tympanum) can be explained in a few words: it is a very small thing, by the fact that it can be carried in a woman’s hand, as it is written in Exodus, ‘So Mary the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand’ (Ex 15:20). And it is the minor wisdom of the ancient law in the hand of the Jews of the synagogue in ancient times. It was also a bagpipe (chorus), a single hide with two brass pipes, and through the first it is blown into; through the second it emits sound. It is a type of the earlier people who had received a narrower understanding of the law, and through the narrow purpose of the proclamation feebly proclaimed all. If, however, I were to look back on earthly things wisely and diligently, they should be understood both spiritually and mystically.

And here is where things got fun. This letter may be the earliest source we have describing what is probably a bagpipe (chorus).

Tympanum (Instruments of Hieronymous)

Now the way that Hrabanus (and also possibly Walafrid Strabo) reads the passage is, I believe, the way I have translated it. But from what I can ascertain by just looking at the pictures, a later document may have read it differently, possibly breaking the above paragraph into two. It provides illustrations of two different instruments, one for each of the two words mentioned above. It is an illuminated manuscript called “Instruments of Hieronymus” (Hieronymus is Jerome’s name in Latin) and is based at least in part on this letter to Dardanus. I have included the two illustrations, one for tympanum and a separate one for chorus.

Chorus (Instruments of Hieronymous)

I assume that Hrabanus and Strabo inferred tuba (trumpet) from the description. Tuba generally refers to a metal wind instrument, usually a long straight war trumpet. But it could also refer more generally to a tube.

What exactly was a timbrel? I’m not sure I can say with any certainty. But let’s just say that I’m really skeptical that it was a bagpipe…

For further information about this translation project, please see my series of posts on Judith.