Dino Buddies: When your AT has OCD

Dino's tombstone, Santa Trinità, Florence

Recently I was reading an interesting blog post about Florence in Dante's time - the period I study.  I noticed a very familiar-sounding quote from someone called Dino Fellows.  I was pretty sure I'd never heard of Dino Fellows, but I did know that quote, so I went back and looked at it again.  And laughed.

The quote was from the early 14th century Florentine civil servant and chronicler, Dino Compagni.  And "Fellows" is one of the things you get if you run the poor guy's name through an automatic translation program.  (Compagni = companions = fellows)

But names are not for translating.  Not in my universe, anyway.  I can cope with writing Florence instead of Firenze, or even Saint Francis instead of San Francesco, but when it's just an ordinary name, of someone whose name doesn't need to be translated into other languages, I don't see why we can't just leave it alone.

AT (Automatic Translation) feels differently, apparently.  It doesn't always translate people's names, but when it gets obsessive and does so, the results can be somewhere between cringe-producing and hilarious.  (I wrote a couple of blog posts about this before, but I need something quick this week, so here I go again.  If you enjoy this sort of silliness, you can find more here and here.)

So I found the Italian Wikipedia entry for Dino.  I've referred to it before, but I read Italian, so I hadn't bothered to have it translated.  This time, out of curiosity, I did - and to my surprise, I got (over the course of the article) no fewer than four different versions of Dino's last name.

The first, and my favorite, was Dino Buddies.  I don't know about you, but there is absolutely no way I would write a blog post about anybody named Dino Buddies.

"Best Buddies," by Romero Britto (in Berlin)

He fared slightly better with the other three:  Dino Companions, Fellow Dino, and Dino Comrades.

Then I wondered what else AT had done to our boy Dino.  I learned, for example, that his famous work was entitled "Chronic things necessary it 'his time" (their take on Cronica delle cose occorrenti ne' tempi suoi).

Dino himself is described as a "politician, writer and historical Italian."  Love those historical Italians.

Florence's popolo grosso (the bourgeoisie) morph into the "fat people," while their humbler contemporaries, the popolo minuto, become the "little people."  Actually, that may not be too far off the mark.

We learn that Dino served his guild (his "Art") as its "console."

Dino the Console?

And he isn't the only one whose name gets bowdlerized.  The Cerchi family, who usually get translated as "the Circles," this time becomes the family of "Looking" - from the Italian verb cercare, to look or search for.

Cerchi arms (hence, "Circles")

"Looking"?  (a pastel work by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner)

Dino's work, however, inspires earnest if incoherent praise:  he focuses on "the real of what is certain."

I find this sort of thing irresistible, so I pursued poor Dino Buddies through a few more Italian sources and let AT have its way with him.

Next I learned that his great work, which was not circulated in his lifetime, "was rediscovered by oblivion until the 18th century, with the publication by the Masons in 1726..."

I think many writers today can relate to being rediscovered by oblivion, not that it isn't bad enough the first time around, but - the Masons?  Dino?  That took me aback, so I went back to the original Italian entry to see what they meant.

Masons like this?

Or like this?

No.  Not the Masons - turns out it was published by this fellow (this companion, this buddy): Ludovico Antonio Muratori, in 1843.

Ludovico Antonio Muratori

I read further, through a summary of Dino's great work (the "Chronic," remember?).  I learned that one section was devoted to "Sulking in Florence between the people and the Large."

The Large would be from another name for the popolo grosso ("fat people"):  the grandi.  But sulking?  The Italian says "malumore," which I would have translated as something closer to "bad feeling," or "ill will," but hey, for all I know they could have been sulking.

Achilles, sulking

Here's another oddity:  "The leaders of the Black Party go to Perugia to apologize to the Death of Pope Benedict XI."  Apologize?  To his death?  For his death, maybe?  But even though the Blacks' allies the French were suspected of having poisoned the pope, the Florentines had had nothing to do with it.  After all, they were back home, sulking.  (What I think was going on here was that the Black leaders were on their way to explain certain of their recent behaviors to His Holiness, only he died before they got there.)

Benedict XI

And then there was the bit about Pistoia:  "This determines the Blacks to deal with the city, which, reduced to an extreme, it is a deal, when then are not observed."  Got all that?  There'll be a quiz.

Not only Pistoia, but Arezzo came in for its share of linguistic mayhem:  "These, after tempted unnecessarily Blacks of Florence, Arezzo ago in a joined forces of white and Ghibelline, which, to his or worthlessness or sadness, goes bad, and it's the last one that the exiles do (May 1306 - July 1397)."  That was, by the way, either a typo or a very long campaign.

There's even a reference to Guido Cavalcanti's famous poem, "A figure of my woman."  Unfortunately, the woman in question is the Virgin Mary, in the form of a miracle-working image in Orsanmichele.  I doubt that Guido intended to be quite so casual about her.

Bernardo Daddi's image of the Madonna in Orsanmichele (successor to the one in Guido's poem)

Oh, and Dino's business associate Cambio Albizzi has become "Exchange Albizzi."  Naturally enough - when you get off the plane in Rome or Milan one of the first things you'll see is a Cambio, or money exchange.  Still...

"Exchange", Russian version

As for Dino himself, we learn something, at last, about his private life:

"Married firstly a Filippa unidentified, from which were born five children:  Nicholas, Ciango, Bartholomew, Tora, Maddalena, Dina, and his second wife Cecca di Puccio Welcome to Forlì."

Huh?  First, even in the Italian version there are six names for those five children, but there at least the semicolon has been retained, so it doesn't look like Filippa Unidentified also gave birth to her own successor.  But "Welcome to Forlì"?

Welcome to Forlì

That would be Cecca di (daughter of) Puccio di (son of) Benvenuto da (from) Forlì.  Yes, Benvenuto does mean "welcome," but here again, a name is being translated, with unfortunate results.

I could go on, but I think that's enough for today.  Besides, if I keep hunting for appropriate pictures to illustrate these silly things, it will defeat the purpose of having a quick and easy topic.

For anyone who's still waiting for the rest of the Medici posts, sorry - I got distracted.  I'll probably pick up at least Salvestro at some point, but I couldn't say when.

Images in this post are in the public domain, with these exceptions:  Dino's tombstone, the Cerchi arms, and Daddi's Madonna are all licensed to Sailko via the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, and the photo of Best Buddies is similarly licensed to Assenmacher.  All are taken from Wikimedia Commons.

Not a lot sperto (Automatic Translation, Part 2)

This sign is a good example of why I prefer reading Italian materials in Italian. The churchgoers who speak Italian are treated to a whole list of things not to do, and even the French and German speakers get more detail than English speakers. Although the terse English comment does rather sum it all up, as well as (perhaps) illustrating an Italian attitude toward English-speaking tourists.

But we were speaking of Automatic Translation (A.T.), as opposed to efforts, however inadequate, by a human being. Let's see what A.T. comes up with when translating a bit of literary criticism, in this case Lorenzo the Magnificent's assessment of the poetry of Guido Cavalcanti (below, sitting on the tombstone):

A vague, sweet and weird style

"As the body was beautiful and graceful, like blood very polite, so I 'do not know that his writings more than any other beautiful, kind and resembled weird, shrill and inventions, wonderful, wonderful, very serious in its judgments, and copious detected in the order, composed, wise and prudent, all of which his blessed virtue of a vague, sweet and weird style, as precious as are adorned."

Wonderful, wonderful indeed. Let's try a more modern critique of Guido's work: "...gentle light that may seem trivial... the vocabulary used by engineers drawn from the absence of dicing, pauses, syntactic inversions." One wonders what the critic would have said, no doubt in an engineer's vocabulary, in the presence of dicing.

Lest Guido suffer his weirdness alone, let's also look at a brief discussion of the famous tenzone (an exchange of poetic insults) between Dante and Forese Donati: "In this combat, built according to the Convention and the stylistic comic-realistic poetry of the time, the two poets reproach each other defects and meanness of all kinds, using slang, if not scurrilous. Dante to Forese blames the lack of sexual prowess, debt, greed food, habits, and the violent birth uncertain, while Forese to Dante criticizes a state of poverty and begging, its origins, some with his father kept making mistakes." Dante's dad wasn't the only one.

And one more before we move on from literature. The Sienese poet Cecco Angiolieri's work is described thus: "The woman-angel becomes a creature on earth, even vulgar. Is catapulted into nightclubs... the presence of a father because of his stingy that parsimony does not allow to squander Cecco to win the beautiful women. The protagonists are his wife, gossipy, sullen, and the lover Becchina, sensual and mean..." It is a rather arresting image, the woman-angel being catapulted into nightclubs, don't you think?

Now let's move on to a historical incident, the violent demise of Corso Donati (remember Run Donates to You, from the last post?):

Trying to escape from his horse:
Death of Run Donates to You

"... was pierced by the lance of one of his guards, while trying to escape from his horse and dropping, dropping, he was caught in a stirrup and his body was dragged and torn from the animal in race." This unfortunate incident is compared to "how the sinners in hell were taken directly from galloping horses and the penalty of drag in a ponytail that municipal statues prescribed for traitors." I am now imagining Corso, in drag and with a ponytail mandated by the Commune. I suspect this is not what was intended.

Not only was poor Corso said to be known for his "banter and insult-prone ways," he apparently was thought to be responsible for early computer viruses. This next quote tells us that Corso was "most cruel... body beautiful, pleasant speaker, adorned with beautiful costumes, subtle wit, his mind always intent on malware... many arson and robbery he did a lot to do..."

Corso was said to have plucked his sister Piccarda out of a convent and forced her to marry Rossellino della Tosa, but it was all right, because "...it is said that providentially died of plague before the wedding is consumed, but it is a legend."

A.T. occasionally seems to damn by faint praise, even when the original meaning was much stronger and more laudatory. Thus, Corso's enemy Vieri dei Cerchi (aka Circles, or Wheels) is said to have "had moments of very favorable", and Dante's ethereal Beatrice is described as "most likely a very nice lady."

Most likely a very nice lady

The city of Florence and its chaotic politics come in for their fair share of garbling. The "noble unravelled city" suffers in part because when A.T. doesn't happen to have a word in its dictionary, it simply leaves the Italian word in place, which results in jumbled paragraphs like this one: "The impotent ones were not help you, but the large ones offended to it, and cosi' the fat popolani that that they were in the ufici and become related to you with large: and many for money were defenses from the pains of the Common one, in that they fell. Waves the good popolani citizens were dissatisfied, and blamed the uficio de' Priori, perchu' the Guelfi large were getlteman."

I don't know if you feel any better informed after reading that; I didn't. But I can well imagine that "Then of tornarono with little fruit; because it was consumed to you much, with breathlessnesses of persons." Those breathlessnesses might explain a lot.

Noble unravelled city

A.T. can be particularly colorful when describing medieval warfare. Thus we learn, for example, that "...the war of Arezzo, pel granted favor da' Fiorentini to the Guelfi hunted from that city..." I had no idea that Pell Grants had anything to do with medieval Italian battles. Infantrymen are called "pedestrians," and we get lively descriptions like this one: "The Aretini vigorous attacked the field yes and with much force, than the formation de' strong Fiorentini it recoiled. The battle was much sour and hard one." No doubt it was.

The title of this post comes from a description of messer Amerigo di Nerbona, the young man left in charge of the Ghibelline forces before the Battle of Campaldino: "... its baron and kind man, the beautifulst young person and of the body, but not a lot sperto in facts of arms..." Had he been a tad more sperto, maybe the Ghibs would have won, but it was not to be.

Pedestrians go to war

We would be remiss to omit an example of the kind of stirring rhetoric that led these people to go to war in the first place. Here's Berto Frescobaldi, exhorting his fellows: "And therefore, getlteman, I council that we exit of this servitude. Prendiam the arms, and we run on the piaza: we kill friends and nimici, of people, how many we of it find, yes that already never we neither our boys are not from soggiogati they." As they say, with friends like that...

Who could fail to be moved by such words? Well, maybe messer Self-confident of Tosa, who rose and spoke next: "Getlteman, the council of savio the knight is good, if it were not too much risk; because, if our thought came lacks, we will all be dead men." Messer Self-confident proposed a sneakier course of action, and if you thought the above was confusing, you'll be pleased that I'm sparing you the rest of his advice.

It is sometimes difficult to figure out exactly who is doing what to whom, in A.T. Note, for example, the following: "19 years after his death, the bodies of Farinata and his wife Florence Adaleta underwent a public trial for the prosecution (posthumous) of heresy. For the occasion, their mortal remains... were exhumed for the celebration of the process... So all the property bequeathed to the heirs were confiscated by Farinata." Maybe if Farinata confiscated property from his own heirs, he had been celebrating the process a bit too much.

Even familiar proverbs get mangled. Take "When the shepherd is struck, the sheep will scatter." Logical enough, yes? A.T. renders it "Percosso the dispersed shepherdesses, fiano the sheep."

And the famous line uttered by Mosca dei Lamberti, " Cosa fatta capo ha," which is still in use in Italy, is usually thought to mean that once a thing is done, the matter is at an end. Compare, then, these A.T. versions:

"A deed done lias an end."
"What done is done."
"A thing done has."
"Cape has done what."
or the laconic "Thing done."

I leave you with this last incoherent morsel: "And holding this shape, it was great usefullness of the people: but I toast was changed, but that the citizens who entered in that uficio, not attendeano to observare the laws, but corrupting them."

Images in this post: sign photographed by Tim Heath; Guido Cavalcanti in a miniature from a manuscript housed in Paris, illustrating a story in Boccaccio's Decameron; miniatures of the death of Corso Donati and of the Battle of Montaperti from an illustrated manuscript of Giovanni Villani's Nuova Cronica in the Vatican Library; Beata Beatrix by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1864-70; view of Florence from the Madonna della Misericordia in the Loggia del Bigallo, Florence. The last five are public domain by virtue of expired copyright.

By any other name (Automatic Translation, Part 1)

Question: What do the following have in common?

1. Dino Similar
2. Lottery of the Best Gain
3. Sniper dei Bardi
4. Moscow Lamberti

Answer: All of them are prominent 13th century Italians, Dante's contemporaries, whose names have been mangled by Automatic Translation (A.T., henceforth).

Some people love their computer games. There's nothing like SIMS, solitaire, or Farmville to serve as an expert time-waster, to abet procrastination, and to keep you distracted. I've managed to resist the siren song of cyber-play for the most part, but I do have a weakness for playing around with A.T.

Not every site provides it. I don't need it, fortunately - I read Italian well enough to get by, and it's Italian history I'm researching. But sometimes, I just can't resist the delicious linguistic loopiness that awaits, and I succumb.

In fact, I've collected so many examples worth sharing that I'm dividing this post into two parts, to fit in as many favorites as I can. This time we'll have a look at what A.T. does to names (and, to a lesser extent, to other nouns); next time we'll look at some longer excerpts, including literary criticism and political commentary.

Sometimes A.T. will read a name as a name and leave it alone, but other times it doggedly tries to translate it, never mind whether it makes any sense or not. This is how the Florentine chronicler Dino Compagni managed to emerge as Dino Similar, or in another instance the somewhat more logical Dino Companions. His fellows in the list above are, respectively, Lotto del Migliore Guadagni (his is actually is not such a bad translation, except for the lottery part); Cecchino dei Bardi; and Mosca dei Lamberti.

Giano the Beautiful

This fine fellow, while attractive enough, is not quite what I'd call beautiful, but his name is Giano della Bella, and there you have it.

The gentleman on the horse, directing demolition operations (they're freeing prisoners to help them overrun the city), is Corso Donati, cousin of Dante's wife Gemma Donati.

Run Donates to You

A.T. has given him the unlikely moniker of Run Donates to You. (Sometimes he pops up as Course rather than Run.) It makes a certain linguistic sense, but somehow it just isn't the same, thinking of him as Run.

It's easy enough to see from the arms of the Cerchi family, shown below, how they manage to come out as the Circles, or the Wheels. To understand how they become You Looking For, you need to know a bit of Italian. This is also, presumably, how a church under that family's patronage became St. Margaret of Looking. And how, when Corso (remember Corso/Run?) married a relative of the Cerchi, she was said to be related to "the father's side wheels."

The Circles (also, The Wheels, or the You Looking For)

If A.T. thinks it is translating from Italian, it is too single-minded to let a snippet of Latin get in its way. Thus, the last will and testament of Folco (Fulk) Portinari, father of Dante's beloved Beatrice, who refers to his daughter in his will by her nickname of Bice, is found by A.T. to have willed "his bike" to the wife of Simone dei Bardi. Simone, by the way, in addition to being Bice's husband, was the brother of that Cecchino known to A.T. as Sniper dei Bardi (but then, these were violent times).

His Bike (with a brother-in-law named Sniper)

His bike? (Photographed from the Casa di Dante)

There are many and more of these, as George R.R. Martin might have said: Lapo di Cambio becomes Lapo Exchange; Sasso da Murli becomes Pebble from Murlo; Baldo dal Borgo becomes Self-Confident from the Village; Salvi del Chiaro Girolami becomes It knows you of the Clear Girolami; and in one that I still haven't quite figured out, Orlando da Chiusi transmogrifies into Bordering from Sluices. (Making sense is optional.)

As a final example of personal names, I give you the redoubtable Farinata degli Uberti, Ghibelline leader and victor at the Battle of Montaperti. "Farinata" is itself a nickname; his birth name was Manente. A.T. managed to turn that into Permanent Uberti, an ironic name which could describe his family's state of exile from Florence once the Guelf party gained ascendancy. In Dante's dramatic account of his meeting with Farinata (A.T. calls him Flour) in Hell, Dante taunts him that while Dante's own ancestors had returned (twice) from exile, the Uberti "had not learned that art."

Permanent Uberti (aka Flour)

Nouns other than proper nouns can also become quite improper in the clutches of A.T. Thus, Florence's powerful Guilds somehow become the Limbs; the Commune itself becomes the Common One; the Grandi, or magnates (the wealthy and the nobility who controlled the government) becomes the Large Ones; and the popolo minuto, or the general populace, becomes The Tiny People. With a cavalier disregard for parts of speech, and retaining in Italian that which it cannot render in English, a phrase meaning "the crime of murder" becomes "one malificio of dead women."

Finally, there is an Italian word which meant something very different in the 13th century than it does today (it may have a different origin; the accents fall in different places, but A.T. doesn't know the difference). What once meant a council (or possibly a single advisor) now refers to a woman providing childcare, and that is why we can learn, thanks to A.T., that the warrior bishop of Arezzo, in the hours before the bloody battle of Campaldino, sought the advice of his nanny.

Next time, whole paragraphs of this stuff. See you then.

Images in this post: Corso Donati and Giano della Bella are from an illustrated copy of Villani's Nuova Cronica, Chigi codex, Vatican Library. Photo of the Cerchi stemma by Sailko, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. Beatrice by Marie Spartali Still, 1895, and Farinata by Andrea del Castagno, both public domain by reason of expired copyright. Sign at top and bike (seen from window of the Casa di Dante museum) photographed by Tim Heath.