The Psalms

The proposed publication of the reader presents the traditional Slavic Psalter. The Church Slavonic text of the Psalter, including prayers for kathismas, prayers for reading several kathismas or the entire Psalter, as well as the charter for the singing of the Psalter all summer, is printed in full accordance with the synodal editions, preserving the structure and all the traditional features of the publication of the liturgical texts of the Church Slavonic press.

For a thoughtful reading, especially for a person who makes the first steps in the study of the Church Slavonic language, Russian literary translation is necessary, in its structure and stylistic means of expression, close to the Slavic Psalter, giving the first guidance and help to read the inspired book in the Church Slavonic language.

In our edition, the psalms are printed with a parallel translation, which is executed directly from the Church Slavonic language. The translation was carried out by E. Birukova (1987) and I. N. Birukov in 1975-1985. Professor BA Vasiliev (1976) was an inspirer of this work at its initial stage, which rendered invaluable assistance to translators with his textological consultations.

Translators sought not only to help our contemporaries penetrate the spirit and meaning of the Psalter, but also to create an equitramistic translation that would be freely read with all the intonations inherent in the Slavonic text, its images and epithets. Unclear images and interpretations without interpretation interpreters carefully deciphered in the spirit of the ancient monument, highlighting such inserts in italics. At work, the following were taken into account: the translation of P. Yungerov with his valuable footnotes; Synodal translation; translation of Bishop Porfiry (Assumption), Explanation of the 118th Psalm of St. Theophanes, the Recluse of Vyshensky; Explanatory Psalter Evfimia Zigabena; patristic interpretations of the saints Athanasius the Great, Cyril of Jerusalem, Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Theodoret of Cyrus and other teachers of the Church, revealing in their creations both the direct, historical meaning of the text and its symbolic and prophetic significance.

Approaching with great reverence for the sacred text, but fearing proseisms and literalisms, the translators rarely had to retreat from the syntactic structure of the Church Slavonic Psalter and, using the accuracy of meaning, resorted to small periphrasis and word rearrangement according to the logic of the modern Russian language.

The translation was checked against the Greek text of the Seventy Miller, it also composed the notes focused on the patristic legend, designed to show the historical context and symbolic meaning of the separate Psalteric verses, as well as to explain the images that are incomprehensible to the modern reader.

Having learned to read the Psalter, the Russian person no longer parted with her. In each family there was this sacred book, which was passed from father to children. The Psalms accompanied the person throughout his life: they read it not only at home, but also took with them to travel, for prayer and edification; the psalms were read over the hard-suffering patients; Until now, the tradition of reading the Psalter for the dead has persisted from the earliest times of Christianity. The statutes of many monasteries still prescribe the reading of the unsaved Psalter.