How pleasant the smell of rain on the horizon, the lights in the friary, and the stillness of the street at the beginning of a night made long by insomnia and the collected poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
It’s not a cure for insomnia, but to occupy my sleepless hours I’ve been putting together a new etext of Fr. Rolfe’s (‘Baron Corvo’) Don Tarquinio: A Kataleptic Phantasmatic Romance, following the first edition (complete with footnotes).1 Rather than publish it all at once, as I have done with other texts, I thought I might try serial publication: one new chapter per diem; today — the prologue and first chapter.2
1. (About the text) As well as copying the text itself, I’ve attempted to imitate the format in which it was originally presented. Although each chapter is a separate html document, the original page breaks are indicated by a horizontal rule; I have included the page numbering and maintained the location of footnote text, even when it is split between two pages. No doubt this is superficially annoying and certainly makes for very ugly mark-up. I don’t care. The page divisions of the original text and the tension of the split foot-notes, of words broken by a horizontal rule as they were broken across pages seems to me a far more satisfying way of reading Rolfe’s novel than a tidy document with an imposed structural validity. This is a matter of personal preference. Should you prefer a different format, I encourage you to use a diffent etext, which may be found via the Online Books Page.
Having effectually alienated you as a potential reader, allow me to make a few observations about Don Tarquinio; Rolfe has two especial peculiarities as an author: first, the rococo Latinity of his vocabulary, the whimsies of which seem, at first glance, to be typographical errors. So, for instance, Rolfe uses ‘tralate’ instead of the more common ‘translate’; this is a warning, but it is also a request — should you happen to find any typographical errors in this (or any of the other texts published here), please tell me, and I will fix them if they are not intentional or endemic. Returning, however, to Rolfe: he also has a fondness for sprinkling Greek throughout his prose, especially in footnotes; I have given the Greek in unicode and included a transliteration and/or translation only when Rolfe does not do so. Although he does include the breathings, he (or his publisher) left out all of the accents — these I have added; I am not, however, an expert in Greek accents and, again, if you notice an error, please tell me.
Finally, my own notes (including transliterations, &c.) are included in [square brackets]; despite my own fondness for footnotes, those included in Don Tarquinio are all Fr. Rolfe’s.
2. Every day for the next twenty-five days I will draw an excerpt from and link to each new chapter here. Should that be too much effort, you can go directly to the latest chapter (updated ca. midnight Pacific time (today excepted)).
Enough of these footnotes!