Visconti Tarot... Lost in Translation

[Enheduanna]

Hello everyone! Here is the scoop. I recently acquired a Visconti Tarot deck as a gift. It was sent to me from a family member over seas. It is beautiful! But there is one problem. the booklet that came with the deck is in Italian. I don’t know Italian. I was wondering if anyone knew of any good reading material based on these sort of decks, or a way that I could find a translation of the LWB from Italian into English?

Any help is appreciated.

 

[jackdaw*]

Well, you could painstakingly enter the text in Babelfish ... or you could go to trionfi.com - the LWB is scanned in English for the US Games version: http://trionfi.com/l/d0yyyy.php?decknr=2287

There are several good books written on the Visconti as well, by Michael Dummett (easy to find on abebooks), Gertrude Moakley (a little harder to find, and haven't read it yet so can't comment), Giordano Berti for Lo Scaraboe (again, can't comment).

Good luck! Which version of the deck is it, do you know?

 

[Enheduanna]

Hello Jackdaw. thanks for the ideas! I had thought about bablefish, but yeah, id much rather not have to do that. The title of the deck is I Taroocchi Visconti, which I am guessing is Visconti Tarot. It is printed by Lo Scarabeo. The thing is the card titles are in four languages, English being one, like decks from that publisher usually are. However it's the booklet that's just in Italian. It really doesn't make sence to me. To have a deck that has multiple languages on the cards, but not for the little book?

 

[Debra]

Hm. My LS Visconti came with a bunch of extra cards with the divinatory meanings on them in 3 or 4 languages...not very useful, actually....

 

[Abrac]

My Visconti Tarots came with a little white pamphlet in English that is about as close to worthless as it gets. The Giordano Berti book is a little better but still not that great. I don't know how much information you want, but Kaplan's Encyclopedia of Tarot, Vols. 1 & 2, have tons of information. Plus you get the fringe bebefit of all the other stuff in there too.

 

[Sheri]

I am waiting for a Visconti so I will probably have the same problem. It is a common one. I have just resigned myself to the fact that all the great decks I want or get will have 2 things in common:

1. Will not have any literature or LWB whatsoever
2. If literature or book or LWB is found, it will not be in English

Not that I would use the literature for assigning card meanings, but sometimes it is nice to know what the creator was thinking when he/she/they came up with the card designs they did.

For the most part, I just work my way through the cards and divine my own meanings from them.

Good luck to you!

valeria

 

[jackdaw*]

Hmmm ... have a look at the USG LWB on the link I posted above. It's very good as LWBs go. But then it depends on how far you want to get into it There are some very good books out there for historic content. And for that matter, many good websites.

 

[Enheduanna]

I was looking over that too Jackdaw, and thank you again for sharing the books and the link with me! I thought the link you posted to the LWB was pretty good also. It seemed to actually explain some of the images, rather then just meanings. I am interested in both for this deck, but more so the images and background of the cards, as my knowledge of this particular deck is regrettably lacking.

 

[jackdaw*]

Andy Pollett's website is very good for brief history: http://it.geocities.com/a_pollett/cards31.htm

It's actually a really good site for short history on many of the historic Tarot decks, and even playing card decks, etc.

Is your deck one with gold foil? I think it's so pretty

 

[Debra]

I found my visconti lwb and it's in English. Not very good, but if you want a copy, pm your address to me, and I'll make a photocopy and mail it to you.