La traduzione slava delle ‘etimologie’ latine nel Salterio di Brunone

Medieval translations from Greek or Latin into (Old) Church Slavonic feature similar issues. The attempt at conveying the sense of the original contrasts with the difficulty to faithfully preserve the formal correspondence at different linguistic levels. Discrepancies in gender can sometimes obscure the symbolic meaning of a word, and this, in the translation of sacred texts, clearly hampers the interpretation of an allegory. This problem is much more evident in the case of word explanations based on the similarity between sound and meaning, as they are found in the commentated Psalter by Bruno of Würzburg (first half of the 11th century), a compilation from various sources translated into Church Slavonic by Dmitry Gerasimov in the first half of the 16th century. The Slavonic text, while literally and correctly rendering the sense of the original, does not allow to retrieve the “deep semantic” relationship between the word to be analysed and its alleged ety ology. The article introduces to this topic and provides in the appendix a short sample of representative examples.