Tuscan History Week

People who've read this story will instantly know what I'm talking about; those who haven't, won't.  This may come to be known as my crowning folly, but for better or worse, here it is.  I've been so close to this damn thing for so long that I am very thankful to be getting it out there, thus exorcising it from my system.

It's my latest translation project.  It is this, a story known as "Messer Papero," though I have given it a rather more verbose title:

(I will reluctantly permit you to call it "Master McDucato" for short.)

It is seven chapters and one hundred ninety pages.  It is a picaresque story about Tuscan* history.  I really don't know anything about its background, but I would be sort of surprised if it wasn't commissioned by some sort of tourism ministry.  That might sound somewhat eccentric, but it doesn't even come close to adequately conveying just how baffling this monster can be.  When I did my version of "Dr. Faustus," I commented that, given some of the content, it would be very surprising indeed if it ever received an official localization.  Well, you ain't seen nothin' yet.  Apart from one bit in a later chapter, there isn't much here that anyone would likely find objectionable per se, but good lord.  Apart from certain infamous stories that promiscuously throw around racial slurs, I don't think there is anything less likely to be published in the US than this.  It's actually a source of some wonderment to me that this thing has ever been published anywhere outside Italy; it's just a testament to how crazy Europeans are about their duck comics, god bless 'em.  And if you haven't read it but think you understand why this would be, YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY THIS WOULD BE.  But you will.  Oh yes.  You. Will. Learn.

*For a very long time, I thought of it as just being about Italian history in general, not having a good grasp of Italian geography (IT'S SHAPED LIKE A BOOT, DAMMIT! WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!?).  But it's not, and that's why the characters never go to Rome or Venice or any other well-known Italian cities outside of Tuscany.

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 This book seems to include a fair bit of commentary by Alberto Becattini on the story, which I'm just itching to read--no doubt it would at least shed some light on certain aspects of the story.  If anyone reading this knows anything about its background, please do not be shy about filling me in.

"But wait," you say.  "I see from the inducks page that this has never been published in French.  Have you been secretly studying new languages, or what?  I demand an explanation!"  

Fair enough: explanation you shall have.  You may recall that earlier this year, I was enthusing about Giovan Battista Carpi.  Well, when I did this, some German fellow (whose pseudonym isn't hard to find or anything, but that I won't mention here in case he doesn't want it thrown about) commented that, yeah, Carpi's awesome, and if you like him, you've gotta read this "Messer Papero" story; it's totally rad.  Thus did I experience great frustration that it had never been published in a language I knew.

Then, hey, this guy said, I have an idea: why don't I send you scripts for the story and then you can render them into more idiomatic English and then I'll insert them back into it.  That sounds great, I said, but also like an inhuman amount of work for you.  Are you sure?  I asked things to this effect more than once, but he assured me that he was used to this; it was no problem.  So…well, he sent me scripts for the first three chapters, and I rewrote them.  He also sent me preliminary versions of the first two with scripts inserted, and man oh man, did they ever look great.  They still needed some editing, but the quality was real professional-caliber.  Had the story by some bizarre turn of events been officially localized, you would've expected it to look more or less like this did.

So everything seemed to be going great, and…then he abruptly dropped completely out of sight and wouldn't answer my emails (there is a certain congruence with my sorry excuse for a love life here).  There are any number of possible reasons for this; not much use in speculating.  So, there I was.  I had a complete set of scans of the story in German that he had sent me, but I don't read German, and even if I did, continuing this on my own just didn't seem like a tenable prospect.  I simply lack that level of technical skill.

So, I just kind of forgot about it, although this project DID no doubt provide at least part of the impetus for my "Dr. Faustus" translation.  After I was done with Faustus, I was casting around for another project to work on, and this "Papero" thing reemerged.  Dammit, thought I, I thought my script was pretty good; it's a shame for all this work to go to waste (it's also a shame for my erstwhile collaborator's work to go to waste, but nothin' I can do about that).  Well, further thought I, how about pure machine translation?  Will that be good enough that I can understand what's going on?  The technology HAS advanced in leaps and bounds, after all.  

So…I typed every goddamn line of text in chapters four through seven into google translate.  And yes!  It DID work quite well!  Sure, there were some mangled bits, but fewer than I had feared, and it was always possible to figure everything out from context (I suspect this technique would not be as effective in translating Hegel).  I had to start over from the beginning with the insertion process; obviously, I couldn't use any of the work that had already been done--so you're stuck with my amateur-hour stuff.  Them's the breaks!  However, even if this other fellow's presence is not explicitly felt, without him, there's no way that this project ever would have come to fruition, so I want to thank him, and also say, hey, if you're reading this, feel free to start commenting again.  We don't hold grudges hereabouts.

"Enough of this self-indulgent babbling," I hear you growl.  "What about the story itself?  Is it any GOOD?"  Hmm.  Well, it used to be towards the bottom of the inducks top 100; as of this writing, it's dropped to number one oh nine, but that is still nothing to sneeze at, and puts it in the very top tier of stories as chosen by inducks voters.  I don't know, though.  Don't get me wrong; if I hated the story, I wouldn't have done all this work, but I frequently find it, let's say, exasperating, for reasons that I will duly enumerate in the coming week (also, Carpi's art, while recognizably Carpi, is nonetheless a bit underwhelming, though it has its moments). 

I think there's an extent to which the story transcends our notions of "good" and "bad," and if that sounds to you like a huge cop-out…well, I won't argue with you.  I would not blame you one bit if you end up hating this story a lot, but if you do, you'll hate it for different reasons than you've hated any other Disney story you've read.  That's gotta be worth something, right?  I do think the guy who introduced me to it rather seriously over-sold it to me; I would, again, be extremely interested to hear from anyone who read it in one of its official printings and rates it really highly.  What's your perspective?

I followed basically the same translation philosophy I did with "Faustus;" my hope is that even if you don't like the story itself, my script can still provide some degree of amusement.  Rest assured, I did not excise any of the history; that's the whole point of the story.  It may be, however, that I do get a mite sarcastic at times, because seriously, sometimes there's just no other way to react to this stuff.  You will note--well, maybe you won't, but I'll certainly point it out to you--that there are more than a few chronological discontinuities and outright historical mistakes here.  Some of these I could have "fixed" in translation, but I elected not to, because I'm not wholly convinced that they aren't intentional, and even if they're not, I feel they add a certain je ne sais quoi to the proceedings.

You'll also notice that the printing/coloring quality isn't the best.  Hey, what can you do, I assume this printing was in a cheap digest.  I actually did a little bit of cleaning up here; to the extent that the margins and speech bubbles aren't littered with random blobs of ink, you can thank me.

Anyway, it's going to work like this: starting today, I'm going to release a chapter of my translation every day for the next week.  Starting tomorrow, I'm going to write a blog entry about one entry 'til I get to the end.  That way, anyone who wants to has the chance to read the chapter in question in advance so as to follow along with the entry.  It'll be fun, dammit!

Here's Chapter One.  I should note that even by the eccentric standards of this story, the first chapter is pretty…slow.  Not a huge amount going on.  There will, I promise, be at least somewhat more incident in later installments, though I could not say whether you will find it to be sufficient, or of the right sort.

Chapter I->