Page 159 - The Grotesque Children's Book

Translator’s Note. On the Translation. I'm probably a little late in telling
you that I don't actually read Italian. Maybe eight words: pasta, vino, denari,
bordello, arrivaderci. All right, call it five. But don't judge me yet, as another
thing you need to know is that every copy of the original Italian version of The
Grotesque Children's Book is lost. Every copy! So there's no original to
translate, anyway. All the copies have disappeared. I have to assume they were
all burned, probably the Medici family, right after Bianca's death, but we'll never
know, will we? After all, the thing about evidence of burned books is...that it's
burned.

So I hear you thinking if every copy was burned, how can there be a
translation?

It's a little complicated. About eighty years after the original Italian novel
vanished forever, a fellow named Roberto Cardano reconstructed the novel, in
English. He based his version on his grandfather's recollection of the original
Italian. I've seen Cardano's English version. It's...I want to be kind here...let's
call it stuffy. Stodgy might be a better word. Not good. Unreadable. No
publisher would touch it. So he paid to have it printed at his own expense, but it
didn't sell, and it fell into obscurity. The only reason I know about is because
there's a single copy in the research archives at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence,
where, as you can guess by the opening sequence, much of the novel's action takes
place. The Uffizi curator was kind enough to allow me to take photos of the
Cardano original. She turned the crinkly pages with gloved hands and I clicked.
It took nearly a week. But I have it, and one day if anyone cares, I'll assemble a
facsimile of it. But honestly, as I say, the English version by Cardano is virtually
unreadable. The original Italian must have been clever and casual, filled with
jokes and puns and wordgames which were clearly lost on the grandson Cardano.
There must have been word games. You can feel it in the names of the
characters: Dr. Ludovico Valerius (“Dr. Hunter for the Truth”), Santi del
Meglio (“Saint-the-Best”), Tozzo Scatenarsi (“Stocky and Stormy”), Aurelio
DeSolo (“Not Hearing, Alone”) and so on, although some of the characters are
actual: Alessandro Allori, Gerolano Cardano, Bianca Cappello, Pietro
Buonaventuri, Joanna of Austria, and of course the Medicis. I wish I could get
my hands on that original Italian version; it must've been a lot of fun, and
probably had a free-wheeling, casual, colloquial style. In my translation, I've
tried to capture some of that casualness, at the expense of trying to evoke the time
period, by ignoring some of Cardano's stodgy old English and substituting a style
which I hope feels a little more off-the-cuff. You might've heard about the Italian
writers Boccaccio or Dante? Supposedly they wrote in a very everyday almost

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