This is a work-in-progress of translating a 1631 eyewitness account of a plague outbreak in Verona into English.

Francesco Pona (1595–1655) wrote Il gran contagio di Verona nel milleseicento, e trenta in 1631, just after the plague epidemic of 1630, which killed around 60% of the population of the city.

Pona was a doctor, author, philosopher and intellectual, and his account is a unique eyewitness testimony of a major plague outbreak.

My project is to translate the text into English, which I don’t believe has been done before, to get it out to a wider public.

The source document is a digitised version of a 1727 reprint (for the centenary?) of the 1631 edition, available on Archive.org. I have not been able to find any digitised versions of the 1631 edition.

It is a quarto of some 120 pages, divided into four untitled books, prefaced by a short dedication, and with a censor’s note adjoined at the end.

The first phase of the project is to clean up and proofread the digitised text. It was clearly made automatically, as it is full of errors and gibberish. Furthermore, the original is entirely in cursive, makes extensive use of ſ (long s), and generally uses the letters u and v interchangeably. This makes reading harder for modern eyes, so I will make modernised versions of the original Venetian available too.

The second phase is the actual translation of the original 1600s Venetian into English. This will no doubt take some time, but I will have everything ready for the fourth centenary of the plague in 2030.