venerdì 3 gennaio 2020

Opening Lines of "Vita di Alberto Pisani" by Carlo Dossi (Translation from the Italian by Maurizio Brancaleoni)


*All rights reserved. No part of the following translation may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior authorization. For information, send an e-mail to mbmbrancaleoni@gmail.com.*

Worthy of Paracelsus! It is the study of the studies. It smells like tobacco, ink and Latin quotations. It's on the boreal side, ground floor; it has a vault, from whence damp came out. It has walls, all shelved, on which are appalling volumes in wire meshes  like the breath of cats. Here are the ten backplates with golden arabesques of the very rare work “de numero atomorum”; nearby is the complete voluminous series of the grammars (grammar, to wit, how you learn to ride a horse by walking); then, a collection of the most bulky disputations…that on the word culex, and the other concerning the letter  e considereth as copula, and the archfierce one “on the nature of the aureola of Mount Tabor”. And here, in a stretch of the last ledge, the famous treatise “de nuce beneventana”, forty octavo tomes  dressed in parchment, which, due to the lack of one, look like dentures bereft of an ocular tooth; here – to cut it short – an endless horde of big bad books, and in the rack outside… specula, theatra, convivia, thesauri… of astrology, theology, etimology, and other sciences ending in  -gy – all witchery.
 

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