Theo Maarten van Lint, born in Delft, the Netherlands, in 1957. Ph.D. from Leiden University. Research Fellow at the Department of Comparative Linguistics of Leiden University.
Fellow (1 September 1997 – 30 June 1998)
During the academic year 1997/98 I was a member of the nucleus “Translation Techniques in Armenian and Syriac”, supervised by Michael Stone and Jos Weitenberg. My contribution to the work of this group was twofold. I conducted comparative philological research facilitating the establishment of a critical text of the Armenian Physiologus, the final editing of which was carried out by Dr. Gohar Muradyan.
In preparation for the publication of Pseudo Zeno’s Anonymous Philosophical Treatise, I made a first translation of some of the chapters and revised them together with Douwe Runia.
Furthermore I made a translation of Bishop Nerses Shnorhali’s Lament of Edessa (1145), a thousand-line poem, which will be published together with an article on it, tracing its moral and intellectual implications for the intended audience, as well as its place in Armenian historiography and poetics.
I also worked on two of the projected six chapters of a monograph dealing with the possible influence of Persian poetics on Medieval Armenian Poetry (1000 1600), provisionally entitled “Middle Armenian Poetry in its International Context”.Work on the monograph as well as on the poem by Shnorhali was carried out as part of a NWO project entitled “Cultural Interaction in the Middle East since the Rise of Islam”.
Work was continued on a project envisaging a critical edition of the Armenian Commentaries on the Throne Vison beheld by the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel (Ez 1 and 10), principally the one by Esayi Ncheci (1255?- 1338) as well as a series of articles surveying the way the Throne Vision appears in Armenian literature and art. A survey article was written which was delivered as a paper and published in the pre acts of a workshop on “Armenian Apocryphal Literature” in Geneva, September 1997, part of which was revised and expanded to cover the poetry by Grigor Narekac’i (945 1002) and the role the Throne Vision plays in it, and which will be published in the Proceedings of the workshop. A contribution was made to “The Apocryphal Ezekiel”, edited by Stone and Satran, probably establishing the date and authorship of a previously known text, a much earlier copy of which was discovered by me in the Matenadaran in Yerevan in 1997.