When S. Peter Cowe wasn't laboring this summer over
medieval translations of 5th-century Armenian manuscripts, he was proofreading
translations of late-20th-century
Armenian plays and laying the foundations for an 18th-century
Armenian cultural history.
No wonder the noted champion of Armenian
language and culture describes himself as a "renegade classicist."
Over two decades of tracing the culture
from its first flowering at the same time as Classical Greece to the
establishment of an independent state in the wake of the Soviet Union's
dissolution, Cowe has developed a reputation for groundbreaking research
spanning two millennia.
"Here you have a vibrant contemporary
culture that can be traced back to about 500 B.C.," said Cowe.
"With the exception of the Greeks and Jews, that's really unique in
Western culture."
During trips to the Armenian Republic to study ancient
biblical texts since glasnost, Cowe — a native of Scotland who is fluent in
French, German, Greek and Armenian — discovered a new crop of
playwrights writing in Armenian. His co-edition of plays by seven of these
playwrights will be published in December by Columbia University Press.
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But nobody could accuse the scholar, who
sits on the editorial board of this country's three leading scholarly journals
for Armenian studies, of neglecting the bread-and-butter of his field. Cowe
now works with a team of Spanish researchers looking at 4th
and 5th-century Greek and
Armenian texts through the prism of medieval Armenian manuscripts for
clues to the earliest version of the Greek Bible. He has written an English
translation of a bibliography of Armenian literature from the 16th to the 19th
century. Moreover, the University of California Press recently published
"Medieval Armenian Manuscripts at the University of California, Los
Angeles," a survey of all the university's holdings that was completed by
Cowe but begun by Sanjian, who died in 1995.
"As a scholar, Sanjian was like my
grandfather," Cowe said. "So in an important way, the lineage
continues."
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