[Sca-cooks] Trying again: introduction and questions

[Sandra J. Kisner]

I'm only just now getting a chance to look at these, and they look quite interesting.  I'll have to look more closely to see how the versions vary, but I rather like having all of them available for comparison's sake.  As Amos says, though, having the original followed by a translation using the same punctuation is good.  It aids in matching phrases if it's a language you know anything about.  But adding a version with cleaned-up punctuation can sometimes help, especially since some older punctuations seems rather arbitrary.

I was a bit confused, however, as you refer to translating a book by Szentbenedeki Mihály, and I don't see anything by that name in the list at the link provided (there are four books there, two in Hungarian, one in English, and one in both).  Is it the Magyar étkeknek fözése?

Sandra

-----Original Message-----
From: Sca-cooks [mailto:sca-cooks-bounces+sjk3=cornell.edu at lists.ansteorra.org] On Behalf Of Julia Szent-Gyorgyi
Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2017 11:43 PM
To: sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Trying again: introduction and questions

<snip>
I did a quick-and-dirty translation of a short cookbook by Szentbenedeki Mihály (Michael of St. Benedict), dated to 1601, and Daniel Myers was kind enough to put it right up on Medieval Cookery (http://medievalcookery.com/etexts.html?Hungary). Then I found another short cookbook (item 25: http://digitalia.lib.pte.hu/?p=1455#toc);
like the much longer Transylvanian court cookbook that Glenn & co got translated, the manuscript is missing its title page, but the 19th century editor (Radvánszky) dated it to the last decades of the 16th century, based on orthography and contextual clues.

I've now completed my first pass through this second short cookbook, going quite a bit more slowly than for the first one, and writing lots of footnotes. There have been many little decisions along the way, but the one that's currently on my mind is punctuation.

Judging by the first recipe, which he gives in a close transcription as well as a modernized one, Radvánszky mostly stuck with the punctuation (or often, lack thereof) of the manuscript. Do I more-or-less stick with this style, and the concomitant occasional utter confusion, or do I try to clarify things a bit with periods and commas? The first approach has the drawback of confusion, the second has the drawback that it adds a layer of interpretation. Which is the lesser of two evils?