Continuities and peculiarities in the Romanian translations of the Book of Psalms: An artistic-philological comparative analysis on the introductory sequence of 'mourning psalms' following a typical structure

The Book of Psalms remains a text full of meanings for researchers in different fields: theology, philology, Byzantine music, visual arts. The angle from which the present analysis was made is a linguistic one, comparatively researching the introductory sequence of ‘mourning psalms’ which follow, from a compositional point of view, a typical structure. Our attention was directed to eight Romanian translations of the Psalter, texts from different eras with the specific language peculiarities of the time. For the sixteenth century, a text containing rhotacization was chosen, namely, the Hurmuzaki Psalter. The seventeenth century was represented by the psalms extracted from the collection of the Bucharest Bible and those versified by Dosoftei. The Psalms of Anthim the Iberian were the exponents of the eighteenth century, and those from the Bible of Andrei Șaguna from Sibiu for the nineteenth century. For the twentieth century, the Psalter of Bartolomeu Anania and the Book of Psalms from the Bible of Gala Galaction were chosen, and the text of the Athonite psalms as representative for the twentieth first century.