Galileo’s Observations of Jupiter’s Moons

 

Le Opere      Vol III       Part 2

 

translation by Charles J. Donovan

 

Galileo's notes on his observations of Jupiter's moons, found in the notebook known as “la vacchetta”, literally the small cow, the calf, because of the leather of its binding, were deciphered, edited and translated by Charles Donovan, Professor Emeritus of El Camino College. His UCLA doctorate is in Romance Literature and Linguistics with a specialization in Medieval Latin, Old French and Italian.

 

Translator-editor’s note:

 

The stilted language of my translations should not be attributed to a deliberate and perverse attempt to do violence to the venerable, though too often over-venerated, Saxon tongue. Take it rather as an attempt to remain as close as possible to Galileo's originals in structure and choice of vocabulary. Granted, this very often results in abnormal word order, and always in the preference for the Latin based word over the Germanic, as in choosing to diminish over to lessen in translating diminuire. I have done this, however, in the hope that it might serve as an aid to anyone up to tackling, on his or her own, the grand old Tuscan's Latinity, his penmanship, and his liberal use of abbreviations.

 

Scans of the 26 pages from Le Opere Vol III part 2

 

Translations of the same 26 pages

 

Individual files for the scans and translations are here.