Italian Rapier Combat Edited and Presented by Jared Kirby

Review by Steven Reich

Hardcover: 147 pages Publisher: Greenhill Books; (May 1, 2004) ISBN: 1853675806 List Price: $39.95

The resurrection of the early 17th century Italian rapier has yielded excellent texts from Italian masters, including Nicoletto Giganti, Francesco Alfieri, Salvator Fabris, and Ridolfo Capo Ferro and the works from these masters provide valuable information on the theory and use of the rapier. Almost everyone who studies rapier for any amount of time will at least be familiar with the name of Capo Ferro and most are exposed to at least a few of his techniques. Unfortunately for English speakers, there have not been any commercially published translations of Capo Ferro’s manuscript. However, Greenhill Books has just released a complete translation of the work, along with all of the images bound as a hardcover book.

I was very impressed with the appearance of this book. It is hardbound, with an attractive dust cover and high quality paper for the pages. Anyone who has seen the electronic versions of the original work will welcome clarity of the images and the readability of the text. The publisher did an excellent job, producing a book that looks professional in every way. I am especially impressed with the quality of the images extracted from the original work. This book is well-constructed and I expect it to hold up well to the use and abuse it will receive from the serious practitioner. Remaining true to the original work, the authors did not alter the order of the text and images with each of the images presented on its own page. In addition to the translation, the authors also provide a glossary of Italian terms in the front of the book. The only flaw in the layout would be the lack of page numbers between page 60 and page 146. I believe this is an editing error, and it does not detract from the utility of the book.

I know that translating is an arduous and thankless task, and there are several factors that the translator must consider when deciding what approach to take. I appreciate the fact that the authors did very little subjective interpretation and resisted the temptation to translate everything using classical fencing terminology. Instead, they retained the original 17th century Italian terminology. However, I must state that I do not fully agree with the philosophy the authors took when preparing this translation. I believe that a translation should be a comfortable read for its target audience, and this translation, in my opinion, is too literal with an unnecessarily high retention of Italian words. While I find it possible to read the book without too much trouble, thanks to my modest skills at reading Italian, I feel that someone who cannot read Italian will find it difficult to understand. For example, in plate 14, the first sentence is:

The above passage is literally very close to the original text. But to fully comprehend it, a typical reader will need to learn six Italian words and ‘decode’ the strange word order of the English--in effect completing the translation himself. One decision on the part of the translators that adds significantly to the difficulty of comprehension is the use of conjugated forms of Italian verbs in the text. For example, instead of merely learning the meaning of cavare, the reader must learn that cavar, cavare, cavando, cavano, cavasse, cavata, cavato, cavera, and cavatione are all different forms of the verb cavare. Making things still more complicated are the explanations in the glossary, that describe the words only with grammatical terminology without examples. Cavano, for example, is described as: "the first person present indicative of cavare."¹ Readers who are not students of grammar or linguistics will likely find this explanation to be frustrating and detrimental to comprehension.

I highly recommend this work to serious students of the Italian rapier. The translation might make full comprehension of the text difficult, but a dedicated student should be able to overcome this inconvenience with a thorough and persistent study of the material. Despite the shortcomings of the translation, this book is definitely worth the money, and a "must-buy" for any student of the rapier.

¹ This is incorrect. Cavano is the third person (plural) present indicative of cavare. One similar mistake is the description of cavasse as the "imperfect subjective of cavare," where "subjective" should be "subjunctive."