“Once we had settled in the holy Monastery of Dragomirna, I began with all diligence to think and be concerned as to how I might correct the Slavonic Patristic books, or to translate them anew from the ancient Greek; and I found a great and unutterable difficulty in this work, for several good reasons. First of all, a translator of books must be completely learned, and not only skilled in all grammatical learning and orthography and a perfect knowledge of the characteristics of both languages, but also he must have touched, and not superficially, upon the very highest studies, poetics, I say, and rhetoric, and philosophy, and even theology itself. But I, even though in my youth I spent four years in the Kiev schools, have studied only in part the grammar of higher studies. But even this little learning, in so many years, I [had] almost completely forgotten; and I feared and trembled to undertake such a great work.”

Source: The Orthodox Word #52.