Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

I was surprised and delighted to see that on the Episcopal Church’s daily reading calendar, today is dedicated to Isabel Florence Hapgood (1850-1928), a lifelong Episcopalian, and a translator of Russian novels and of major liturgical books from the Church Slavonic.

Her name jogged my memory, and I was able to find the following paragraph from a paper I wrote in grad school about a North American jurisdiction of the Orthodox Church that uses her translations. It’s not filled with too much jargon, so I offer it here for your benefit:

As early as 1895, Isabel Florence Hapgood began work on a complete service book in English, at the request of Bishop Nicholas Ziorov of the Russian Missionary Diocese. Her translation, the Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church, was completed in 1906, and was intended for use by the Russian Orthodox community in America.

Miss Hapgood was very clear about her motivation to translate the critical liturgies in one volume: she recognized that English was the “Pan-Slavonic language in America” that parishes would have to accept if they were to speak both to the needs of multiple immigrant groups and to children raised to speak English.

But not just any English would do: Hapgood’s Anglican heritage caused her to privilege the language of the Book of Common Prayer, with a definite preference for antique forms of speech. It was this English that the Antiochian Archdiocese came to prefer, and which it actively preserved by publishing Hapgood’s volume in 1917.

It is a testament to the quality of her translation that the Archdiocese has continued to republish this book to the present day, in spite of two major subsequent translations. In fact, for some less frequently performed liturgies, such as ordinations, the consecration of churches, or the burial of infants and priests, it is the only English option available today.

It is perhaps significant that Hapgood’s work represented a kind of climax to the early 20th-century impulse amongst Anglicans and Episcopalians for unity with the Russian Orthodox Church. Her translation remains an exemplary demonstration of how Orthodox liturgical language could be manifested in a way that takes seriously the expressive possibilities of the English language.

Yours in Christ,

—Justin