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It's finally done. It cost me a year and a half of work, nearly three mechanical pencils, and the regrowth of my writer's callus, but I have finally finished translating the entirety of Caroso's 'Il Balarino.' All four-hundred-mumble pages of it, every word.
For those of you who aren't intensive renaissance dance geeks (that would be nearly everyone except perhaps two hardcore co-nerds reading this), 'Il Balarino' is a sixteenth-century Italian dance manual. It's full of all sorts of wonderful instructions on how to perform certain steps, detailed descriptions of dances, confusing smarmy poetry, and snippy comments on how other, lesser dance masters do everything wrong, wrong, wrong. I've spent the last 18 months, give or take, trying to translate it, in spite of not having much background in Italian history or language. And now I have.
Of course, now it still needs to be typed up, and finessed from Italian-grammar-with-English-words into actual English, and there are all sorts of notes I want to take on what sort of details happen in which kinds of dances, and I really ought to put it on the web somewhere so that it can actually be useful to the other three dance geeks in the world. And then there's the question of what other translating projects to work on next, since off the top of my head I can think of a Commedia dell'Arte book, a cookbook, and a gaming article that are all waiting to be worked on. But for now, I'm going to sit here and stare at the huge stack of scribbled-up paper that I have created and feel momentarily smug and useful.
For those of you who aren't intensive renaissance dance geeks (that would be nearly everyone except perhaps two hardcore co-nerds reading this), 'Il Balarino' is a sixteenth-century Italian dance manual. It's full of all sorts of wonderful instructions on how to perform certain steps, detailed descriptions of dances, confusing smarmy poetry, and snippy comments on how other, lesser dance masters do everything wrong, wrong, wrong. I've spent the last 18 months, give or take, trying to translate it, in spite of not having much background in Italian history or language. And now I have.
Of course, now it still needs to be typed up, and finessed from Italian-grammar-with-English-words into actual English, and there are all sorts of notes I want to take on what sort of details happen in which kinds of dances, and I really ought to put it on the web somewhere so that it can actually be useful to the other three dance geeks in the world. And then there's the question of what other translating projects to work on next, since off the top of my head I can think of a Commedia dell'Arte book, a cookbook, and a gaming article that are all waiting to be worked on. But for now, I'm going to sit here and stare at the huge stack of scribbled-up paper that I have created and feel momentarily smug and useful.
