David Savignac

This is the second edition of this translation. Errors present in the 1st edition were corrected and the translation now follows strict chronological order. In addition to being on the Internet (https://sites.google.com/site/pskovrelease3/), it can now be downloaded.

This is the diary of Arthur Noel Savignac (1861-1925) who was  born "Noel Hercule Savignac" in Berthier, Quebec. He served in an artillery unit of the  Royal Canadian Army and had attained the rank of staff sergeant. The diary begins in the early spring of 1885, when Canadian military forces were mobilized to confront Louis Riel, a Métis Indian who led his people in Western Canada in what became known as the North-West Rebellion of 1885. Years later, Savignac became  a physician and had a practice in the town of Amesbury, Massachusetts.  His diary begins in the spring of 1885 with an account of his participation in the quelling of the uprising  and ends in Massachusetts in mid-1891, shortly after the death of one of his patients.  The diary was transcribed (and, possibly, translated) by his son Eugene Savignac (1909-1966), who was also a physician.

Despite its limitations, there are situations in which the machine does a very good job. However, due to the complexity of the language, there are often cases of mistranslation. Although a human translator is better, steady progress is being made in quality, and the use of machine translation.

A slightly updated version of the 2016 paper, "The Medieval Russian Account of the Fourth Crusade -- A New Annotated Translation."  Other earlier translations were dependent on the text found in the Novgorod 1st Chronicle; the present translation uses the Tver Chronicle as its base document. The updates to the earlier version are relatively minor and center mainly on the reason for giving precedence to the Tver Chronicle text; the translation provided in the earlier paper is essentially unchangedː

Exploiting my dissertation might present difficulties to interested scholars – not only because of its length, but also because it is a copy of a microfilm of an original document typed on mechanical typewriters, and therefore it can be quite difficult to read.  I am therefore providing two synopses of the main points of the work: one which was sent to Dissertation Abstracts in 1974, and the other being the Conclusion found at the end of the dissertation itself.

I am in the process of creating an annotated English translation of the Novgorod 1st Chronicle.

The existing translation by Nevill Forbes and Robert Michell was published in 1914 and was probably as good as could have been created at the time.  However, a century has passed and their translation is out of date.  The English of the translation is fairly awkward, at times needlessly following Old Russian word order. The translators did not have the benefit of the extensive lexical resources now at our disposal, and that led to errors in translation which are at times significant. Finally, in some places it is very unclear just which Novgorod chronicle was being translated — the First, the Second, or the Fourth.

The work in progress consists of translating and annotating both the Older and the Younger Recensions of the chronicle, using the edition of N.A. Nasonov, originally published in 1950 and republished in 2000.  The plan had been to have the translation completed, annotated, and released in 2018, but health issues have caused it to be delayed until the end of 2019 or perhaps by mid-2020.  Current plans call for it to be published online, much like its sister chronicle, the Pskov 3rd Chronicle, available at https://www.academia.edu/28622167.

Inquiries, comments, and advice are welcome. 

David Savignac 
(dsavignac@aol.com)