From my diary

Happy New Year, everybody.  We can leave behind all the chores of last year, and plan to do some good things.

Over the Christmas period, I took a long hard look at the St Nicholas project, and decided that it was time to guillotine it and actually release something.  I was just getting deeper and deeper into text critical issues, for which I have no special qualification.  So … it is out there.

Yesterday I was looking at loose ends.  One of these was a pair of publications from the St Nicholas Centre in Bari have been sitting next to my computer for a couple of years now.  This is because one of them contained an Italian translation of the text by John the Deacon.  But the majority of the content was about the “translation of the relics” – i.e. the movement of the bones – of St Nicholas from Myra in Turkey to Bari in Southern Italy.  This took place in 1087.

In fact there are two accounts, written very close to the time, which have got rather mingled together in the medieval copies.  The scribes were mainly concerned with producing something edifying for liturgical use, and were not very bothered about who wrote what.

But what makes this funny is that the two accounts were written by different factions in Bari.  Bari had been the capital of the Byzantine province, until it was seized by the Norman Robert Guiscard a few years earlier.  This bandit had levied a heavy tax, and then moved on to attack somewhere else.  The tax fell mainly on the middle classes, as such things do, and these were looking for a way to restore the economy.  So they decided to steal the bones of St Nicholas.  Once they got them back, actual fighting broke out over who got them.  One side was the Byzantine supporters; the other was those who were sucking up to Guiscard.

There are still two recensions of the text in the manuscripts; the “Vatican” and the “Beneventan”.  But each is a  mixture of the two accounts.  The names come from the manuscript which leads each family of manuscripts of each type.

I’ve made quite a dent in translating the St Nicholas literature in general, and I thought perhaps I should take the Italian translation of one of the accounts – that by “Nicephorus” – and run it through Google Translate.  So I got my old book scanner out – a Plustek Opticbook 3600 – and set to work.  After about 40 pages it stopped, and told me that the scanner needed to warm up (!).  A page later it did it again.  In fact what was happening was that it was overheating.  I turned it all off and left it for an hour, and I was able to do the rest.

Then I ran Abbyy Finereader 15 on it, and got a very decent Word document.  This in turn started to translate very easily.  But then I saw in a footnote that an English translation existed, made by a certain Charles W. Jones. A quick google, and I discovered that this was already online at the St Nicholas website, here.

So… no need to do it myself! I filed away the bits and pieces.  One less thing to do.  It’s an odd feeling to see the “St Nicholas” shortcut vanish from my desktop after five years!

I wondered about replacing the scanner.  It’s a real nuisance to only handle 40-50 pages at a go.  But to buy a new one of the same type looks like real money. They now call it a Plustek Opticbook 3800L, as far as I can see.  I don’t scan much any more.  So maybe I shall live with it!

I’ll have to check over any other loose ends, and then look at what’s next!