Can Anyone Publish Bishop Basil Rodzianko’s 1996 Book if I Give Away My English Translation?

[Update 15 January 2025: a few publishers have been put in touch with me, and one is interested who is also seeking help from a translator. That would be wonderful! I’ve also gotten this helpful correction from a kind reader providing information about some permissions that the publisher will need in order to move forward: “The work will enter the public domain in 2069, and until then, you’d probably need the written permission of the rightsholder (presumably the Holy Archangels Foundation or one of Bishop Rodzianko’s descendants) to publish a translation, otherwise you’re running afoul of the law.”]

Dear readers, I am getting a steady stream of requests for more access options with the text that I translated (using several large language model tools) of Bishop Basil Rodzianko’s 1996 book The Theory of the Big Bang and the Faith of the Holy Fathers. It is relatively easy to self-publish a book using the simple tools provided with Amazon’s “Kindle Direct Publishing” (KDP) program to distribute both a paperback (print on demand) and an e-book (for Kindle). I have one reader here of Copious Flowers who has even volunteered to cover the cost of an ISBN if that is helpful to any prospective publisher.

For various reasons, I am not in a position to publish this myself, but I would gladly give away my machine translation at no cost to anyone who would be interested to publish this material and to make it available at the lowest possible costs in these two formats. Any proceeds from sales in this format would go to the publisher (and anyone who they designate as they would decide). I would include my notes and any supporting forward or other such materials as might be helpful. Some readers on Copious Flowers have also been helpful in gathering additional information about the original (mostly Greek) sources and contemporary English translations for the many patristic and liturgical text quoted by Bishop Basil and cited in Russian editions within his footnotes. I suspect that help would be forthcoming to provide more such information for a published version of this book in English. Of course having notes or a forward by qualified theologians or patristic scholars that others might be able to recruit could also be a great help, and I would be glad for that to happen if someone else picks this up and wishes to support it further in any such ways.

I have heard from a few readers who are wanting to share this book with a couple different scholars and leaders in different fields of study, so help might come from multiple directions for anyone willing to consider undertaking this publication effort. Because the entire Russian text was shared publicly online here on the official rodzianko.org website, this translation into English should be legal to publish as I understand it (as long as it references that public text in the original Russian and as long as I give away this translation as I am glad to do). [Note: I was wrong about this. See update at the top.]

If anyone knows someone who might consider this but who cannot get access to this content to review it, please message me with their email address, and I will be glad to provide free review access for them.

Again, here is my English text and note’s on Bishop Basil Rodzianko’s 1996 book The Theory of the Big Bang and the Faith of the Holy Fathers:

• Link here for Part 1

• Link here for Part 2

Thank you all for considering how to spread the word and to get this done together!

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P.S. This chat (learn more here) with author and retired parish priest Addison Hodges Hart along with Wheaton College art history professor Matthew Milliner makes several references to this book by Bishop Basil Rodzianko: