Saturday, August 26, 2006

Vittoria Colonna translations on the web

Ellen Moody has a beautiful translation project up on the web: Amaro Lagrimar: The Poems of Vittoria Colonna. I haven't read it yet but on first glance it looks very interesting. Moody provided a nice bibliography with this project as well.

Wikipedia has a short biography of Vittoria Colonna with some historical context.

I find myself thinking I should do this with a bunch of the writers I've been translating (at least the public domain ones.) Also, for anyone I work on - living, dead, public-domain-dead, or alien visitor from the future - I should make a Wikipedia entry in English and one in Spanish. Editing the Wikipedia is not difficult. You can learn to do it in an hour or so.

Ideally, an online compilation like this would be part of a greater whole, structured for flexibility and feedback. My ideal social software application would allow for this but would be more structured than other collaborative textual collections like Wikipedia. For example, wouldn't it be nice to be able to comment on each poem, the way you can comment on a blog? And to tag the poems with notes, keywords, associations, the way you can tag photos on Flickr? And to generate a page or a file with all the poems by a certain author, or from a particular locality, or subject, to download in plain text to your own computer?

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