From my diary

It’s been a little while since I posted an update.  Of course it is summer, here at Pearse Towers, and I spend my days frolicking in the sunshine, away from the laptop.  Or perhaps not.

In truth the weather has discouraged indoor pursuits until this week.  Such time as I can spare from lazing around is spent on some tedious but necessary chores.

There are no translations in flight at the moment.  However a lady has offered to work on Eusebius’ Commentary on Luke, half of which was translated last year.  I do not know whether this will come to anything.

I shall have to return to work soon.  But while I am job-hunting, and as the weather worsens, I daresay that I shall return to turning Eutychius in Italian into not-very-good English.  Somebody has to, as a first stage in getting Eutychius better known, and evidently it falls to me.

While searching for the source of the prospect of the Colosseum in the last post, I stumbled across Goethe’s Journey into Italy.  Apparently this is a classic, although I had never heard of it.  But travelogues to Italy are always welcome.  Thanks to the power of Amazon, a copy of the Penguin translation should reach me tomorrow; and I hope to travel, with Goethe as my guide, across the Alps into the Italy of the late 18th century.

I was reflecting today on how much literature there is in Italian which is quite unknown in the English-speaking world.  It is bad enough that much US scholarship is oblivious of anything not written in English.  This means that excellent French and German literature goes unnoticed.  But Italian is in a far worse state; the very existence of Italian studies is hard to verify, and books and pamphlets in that language – and there are very many of these – are quite difficult to obtain.

Really this is something for some Italian philanthropist, to create an Italian equivalent of Google Books and mass-digitise the riches of the Italian past.  We have the marvels of Google Translate.  All we need is way to find the literature.

Share

One thought on “From my diary

  1. For some years I’ve made frequent use of amazon.it – they also have a useful sales “stunt” of adding other titles that may be of interest to the “estimato cliente”. You’re right, Patristic studies flourishes in Italy, with a host of affordable publications. Just got complete theological discourses of Gregory of Nazianz, Greek/Italian, with useful (and reliable) notes.

Leave a Reply