Prevention, not repression
The good news-the bad news-the good news
ROME: 17th February 2006 -- The good news is that Fr Peter
Braido's major work on the preventive system, Prevenire, non
reprimere, has been translated into English. The bad news is that,
in immortal words quoted earlier, or along those lines at least, 'the
effort needs to be reworded'! The good news is that this is underway
and you can already begin with what has been done, the which can be found on Bosconet under the
rubric of Useful
texts.
It seems a shame that one of the best studies in existence on Don
Bosco's preventive system has not been available to English-only
readers, but the translation of Italian academic texts is a daunting
task. Fr Vincent Zuliani SUE (a province not a congregation!) God
bless his sterling soul, did a first run through on the translation
several years ago and it got lost in paperwork somewhere. By his own
admisson it needed several more 'run throughs', besides, it is in
barely digital form minus the footnotes, and these make up a
substantial part of the text, so they simply have to be added in. But
the English speaking world is going to owe a great debt of gratitude to
this good man.
In the meantime, there is work to be done. The text has to be
stripped back to plain text and reformatted to remove all kinds of
unsightly gaps that crept in to the first 'run through'. That's a
minor and relatively simple technical task, but time-consuming. Then
it needs to be re-read and in places re-written. It is eminently
faithful to Braido's Italian, and now needs to become eminently
faithful to a universal English readership. Again, time-consuming.
Finally - no not finally, but an important third, the footnotes need to
be added in and Italian footnoting for academic texts is quite
different from that of Chicago or Turabian!
Yet again, time-consuming.
Assuming that the above is done in spare time, and given some
experience already of the above three tasks, you can assume a week per
chapter. There are 19 chapters, so we are looking at something like 5
months. July should see the task completed. In the meantime, you can
watch work in progress, and benefit from it. Of course, in the
interests of fair dealing, it may be unethical to make all the chapters
available in Bosconet, but while my conscience remains flexible, profit
by it. The introduction and Chapter 1 are done. A weekly reminder of
progress on other chapters will be forthcoming.
Now, there could be even better news. If someone would be prepared
to take just a chapter, and reduce the load a bit (they would, of
course, need access to the Italian 1999 edition, but that's not too
difficult to come by), the job could be done a lot quicker. Any
takers? I would be prepared to offer appropriate guidelines and ensure
an overall consistency....in other words, you too may get reworded, but
there is no question the job would be completed and into the hands of a
publisher in something less than five months. That has to be good news
for English-only readers. Please note that what you will be reading in
Bosconet is not a final version, but it will be the last-but-final.
Any comments whatsoever will be welcomed.
GLOSSARY
the which: no, not an error, though a
touch archaic.
Chicago or Turabian: two of the most
widely accepted English language academic style manuals.
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