so I can’t possibly review anything other than this exact translation; I can’t even speak to the nature of the book. the Romanian historian Ioan Aurel Pop wrote of Neagoe Basarab’s Teachings to His Son Theodosie that it was a comparable work to The Prince which covered practical and political wisdom for fledgling lords. reading this translation, you could be forgiven for thinking that Pop was off his rocker because this is incomprehensible christiany gobbledigook. it reads like the lore in Outlast 2.

BUT I think this is entirely due to the translation! this edition is the only easily accessible English translation of Basarab’s work, and that is because it is available from a crazy nun somewhere in Oceania. I know this because I emailed her to find the name of the translator for this edition when adding it to Storygraph; her edition doesn’t contain translator information. the email thread was… odd and terse, to say the least. I have no clue who translated this, and I suspect it is a highly embellished translation from modern Romanian and not from the original Old Church Slavonic. this theory is reinforced by the fact that there is a quote attributed to the 20th century Romanian doctor Marius Nasta in this book that was written in the 1520s (????).

if you read classic works that were written under christianity, like (very variously) The Prince, the Tristan of von Strassburg, the works of Paracelcus, and so on, you can see how the authors circumvent the narrative of christianity while still including a pastiche of christian morality in order to avoid censorship. I can’t know for sure until I get my hands on a different translation of this, which I will do as soon as I can find one, but I suspect that Nun Christina’s “translation” is full of religious embellishment. Her caginess about the provenance of the text and the poor quality of the translation make the fidelity of this edition highly suspicious.