Aradia, the New Translation -- (general review)
Jenny
jennyg@compuserve.com
Wed Apr 21 15:11:25 1999
_Aradia, or, The Gospel of the Witches.  A New Translation_ by Mario and Dina Pazzaglini (Phoenix Publishing, $21.50)*p**br*Back in the 19th century, an untrained folklorist named Charles Godfrey Leland published a collection of materials he collected from an Italian woman named Maddelina.  Maddelina called herself a strega, and claimed that these were the teachings of Italian witches.  Leland's book had a deep impact on modern Witchcraft and contains the earliest "version" of the Charge of the Goddess.*p*To date, Aradia has faced two problems.  First, it's never received adequate scholarly attention.  Largely because of the backlash against Margaret Murray and her Witch-Cult hypothesis, _Aradia_ has been branded a forgery by many historians, dismissed without investigation by most.  The second problem is that Leland's translation of the Italian poetry is horribly Victorian, grating to modern ears.*p*The new translation of _Aradia_ addresses these two problems.  But I can't say that it solves them.*p*I thought it would.  I expected this to be a new translation based on an examination of Leland's original documents, done by someone with training in textual analysis, paleography, or translation.  I thought that the articles would be scholarly ones, written by experts in this field.  *p*And that's not quite the case.*p*_Aradia_ contains the original Leland translation;  a new translation by the Pazzaglinis;  a line-by-line comparison of the two;  plus articles by Stewart Farrar, Chas Clifton, Robert Chartowich, Mario Pazzaglini, and Robert Mathieson.  Looking at that list, you may notice that everyone on it -- except possibly Mathieson -- is Pagan.  *p*Normally I wouldn't think that was a problem.  But when I finished Aradia, I was left with the disturbing impression that this was a partisan book, not a work of unbiased scholarship.  Most of the articles made a lot of assumptions.  Assumptions common in Neo-Paganism (eg., Wicca is an ancient tradition) but not to people outside our faith.  It reminded me of 19th century Catholic scholarship -- interesting, with good details.  But stuff that might only be convincing to another Catholic.*p*I'm going to do a couple more posts, one on the articles, one on the translation itself.  My summary impression is, this is a good book and worth the money, but not as good as I'd hoped.*p*Jenny