Ed io sarò tua guida...

«Ond' io per lo tuo me' penso e discerno
Che tu mi segui, ed io sarò tua guida,
E trarrotti di qui per loco eterno...»

[Therefore, for your sake, I do think and discern
That you should follow me, and I will be your guide,
And bring you hence through that eternal place...]

--Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno

As I said in the post prior, I created this page as a distraction and as an excuse to practice translation. It should still fulfill these functions, but I would also like it to serve as a journal of my experiences. By journal, I do not mean a daily accounting in the sense of the word's root. There will be gaps, compressions and extensions of time, chronological reorderings; parts will stand in for the whole and much will go untold. I hope though that it will record in some part the details and thoughts that comprise my life.

As before, I will depend heavily on excerpts of texts. At times, the words of others will stand in for my own. At others, they will merely inform or mirror the words I use to tell my story. And sometimes, as is in the nature of graduate studies, the texts themselves will be the story.

Rebirth (Rehashed)

A christening, iterum:

«...talvolta città diverse si succedono sopra lo stesso suolo e sotto lo stesso nome, nascono e muoiono sensa essersi conosciute, incomunicabili tra loro. Alle volte anche i nomi degli abitanti restano uguali, e l'accento delle voci, e perfino i lineamenti delle facce; ma gli dèi che abitano sotto i nomi e sopra i luoghi se ne sono andati senza dir nulla e al loro posto si sono annidate dèi estranei. È vano chiedersi se essi sono migliori o peggiori degli antichi, dato che non esiste tra loro alcun rapporto, cosí come le vecchie cartoline non rappresentano Maurilia com'era, ma un'altra città che per caso si chiamava Maurilia come questa.»

[...sometimes different cities follow each other on the same ground and under the same name, born and dying without being known to one another, incommunicable to each other. At times, the names of the residents even remain the same, and the accent of their voices, and even the lines of their faces; but the gods, who dwell under names and above places, left without saying anything, and, in their stead, foreign gods have nestled. It is useless to ask if they are better or worse than the old gods, given that no relationship exists between them, just as the old postcards do not represent Maurilia as it was, but rather another city which by chance was called Maurilia like this one.]

--Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

---

«In quella parte del libro della mia memoria, dinanzi alla quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica, la quale dice: incipit Vita Nova. Sotto la quale rubrica io trovo scritte le parole, le quali è mio intendimento d'assemprare in questo libello, e se non tutte, almeno la loro sentenzia.»

[In that part of the book of my memory, before which little can be read, one finds a rubric which says: New Life begins. Under that rubric I find words written which I intend to copy in this little book; if not all of them, at the least, their substance.]

--Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova

I began this site as a distraction from graduate school and as an excuse to practice translation. Due to a lack of discipline, in both the frequency and the content of posts, I quickly let the project become a jumbled and confused mess of whims, devoid of any semblance of form or function.

Soon I start graduate school anew. It strikes me as a good time to begin here also afresh. This time there shall be order. Perhaps even some value and purpose.