Paraphrasing Capo Ferro: Some admonitions, or advice, of fencing
Posted by Janka
Onwards, ho.
(1) No! I am totally not making that up, you suspicious people! He actually uses a word translated as "delight".1) Keep your eyes on the swordhand of the adversary, because that's the best place to look at to see what he's up to.
2) Of parrying and striking, and voiding the body. When you parry, you must follow it with a strike; when you strike, you should do so with a parry. If you do not strike, avoid their strike. If you parry with the dagger, strike with the sword.
3) The virtue of the unaccompanied sword. The unaccompanied sword is the best. Not only is it the most fun(1), but it's also most useful in teaching you to do the basics properly.
4) Method that one must employ against a bestial man(2). That is, someone without any sensible measure and tempo, who flails blows at you with brute force. You can do two things. Mezzo tempo play to strike him to the arm while he flails about will be explained later. Alternatively, you can evade a little by pulling back so as to make his blow land in empty air, and then immediately stab his chest.
5) Way of becoming a perfect player. Taking lessons is not enough. You must also seek daily to play, and do so with diverse opponents. Practice with those better than you.(3)
6) Of the most secure guard. As I already said in the theory book, terza at the middle of the body is the best.
7) Of the vanity of the feints. Feints are no good, really, because they make you lose timing and measure. If you feint out of measure, what the hell for would I move? If you feint on measure, I can strike you when you take your pose(4).
8) From whom must one learn. There are some people who want to teach as soon as they have learned something. That is not good. Knowing something is not the same as knowing it well enough to be able to teach it.(5)
9) Of gaining the sword. Gaining the sword is of very great importance. Likewise is recovering yours if he has it.(6) You must know three things about this. First, if you disengage, do not do it to throw a full-out cut, because while you are winding up to it he will stab you. Second, if you retreat so that he has to move his right leg to strike you, that movement will create timing for you in which to strike(7). Third, "to stringere" means nothing more mystical but "to gain the sword".
10) Of striking in contratempo(8) I only approve of two contratempo strikes. One is if you are in quarta with your point on your right and he comes to gain the sword, when he moves his right foot to cross the swords, you can strike him, still in quarta. The other is when you are in terza, and he comes to gain it from the outside, you counter-attack in seconda. Both of these can be done with either a lunge or a pass.(9)
11) Of walking. Masters really can't agree on how to step with weapons in hand. I say that when you have to step on the line, it is a good idea to always keep your right shoulder forward, and left foot pointing to the side, and always have both feet move when you take a step.(10)
12) Methods of striking the hand. Whenever the adversary puts his point somewhere away from you, be it too high or too low, or too much to your left or right, you can place your sword towards his hand, and then approach measure taking care your body stays to the back, and once you are on measure strike in mezzo tempo(11) to that hand. When you do, bend your right knee and push your body forward to hit, but at the same time push your left leg back and recover quickly there(12). If you want to strike the dagger hand instead, this same method works.
13) Method of retiring, having struck Whenever you have struck, you must immediately recover. If you have room, it is best to take too passes(13) back, so that you end up back in guard. Sometimes you can take one step, and sometimes you can only bring back the right foot, but if you at all can you should do the two passes.
(2) Unfortunately no werewolves involved.
(3) Anyone for a Rapier Freeplay Club?
(4) Yes, he totally seems to contradict himself, considering most of his plays on the plate later have some sort of feint or another in them. But Orava said something interesting in the car last Wednesday after class. He feints quite well, unlike practically all of the rest of us. He said that it is probably because inside his head he really actually never feints as such, he attacks -- but then does not go forward if the situation changes as he expects it to. If it does not, though, he is prepared to go forward and kill the other guy. This "mental state" of attacking is very likely why we perceive his feints as more "real" than those of others'. CF is correct that if you do a feint as "feint, wait to see what happens, do something else", you lose tempo. But if you do them just as "start an attack and react depending", maybe you don't, at least not as much.
(5) Considering the state of the art in various weapons/styles hereabouts, though, not like we have all that much choice in that regard. And Helsinki is luckier in that than most other places... So meh. I think we'll disregard that for the next 20 years or so and just learn from whomever we can grab that seems to be further on the road than us, or if one is not found, from each other.
(6) The uninitiated must now just bear with us. The concept of "gaining the sword" is easy to explain if we both have swords and are in the same room; explaining it in text is beyond poor old me, as I am firmly in the group of people that was just warned about in the previous paragraph.
(7) And doing so sooner or later is a good idea, or else you will end up just retreating until you hit a wall or he gets lucky.
(8) That is, to strike on a tempo that is created by his strike, or, to put it really simply, at the same time as he.
(9) It would be too much to ask that he would actually explain why he does not approve of a counter-attack in quarta from terza, now, would it?
(10) Or whatever, I can't make heads or tails of this paragraph, frankly.
(11) If my tempo interpretations are correct, this pretty much means simply "really really quickly".
(12) "... just by propelling the body forward and bending the right knee will one strike, but you will take care that in such striking you must carry the left foot back, accompanied by the right". Sometimes explained as meaning a pass back, but I don't think that's right.
(13) Fucker uses "ordinary pace" for what is obviously a pass now, just when I in the previous chapters decided it cannot be. I am so not going back there on this read-through.
