\thispagestyle{empty}
\pagenumbering{roman}

\begin{centering}

\hbox{ }
\vskip3cm
\huge{Le Superficie Algebriche}
\vskip3cm

\huge{Federigo Enriques}
\vskip3cm

\large{With Forewords by Guido Castelnuovo (1949) \par and Mickey Mouse
(1999)}

\vskip2cm

\large{English translation by Fabrizio Catanese,\par
 Ciro Ciliberto and Rita Pardini \par
 Edited by Miles Reid \par
 to appear CUP 2000}

\end{centering}

\clearpage

\paragraph{Status of these files}

The book was translated by Fabrizio Catanese, Ciro Ciliberto and Rita
Pardini in the early 1990s. A draft (printout of word document) was sent
to CUP, who intend to publish it in their historical series.

About 5 years later, CUP asked Ciro again for the computer files, which
came on a disk, and eventually copied to me. I roughly translated the
word files into latex, and made some corrections to the English. A
printout went back to CUP, and was copy-edited around 2000.

The files as they came to me were
\begin{enumerate}
\item written by 3 different translators, with different styles and
command of different subsets of the English language (thus
inconsistent);

\item written using word, with different home-made typefaces (e.g. Greek
letter \(\tau\) as computer Latin letter $t$ in a different typeface);

\item several chapters were saved to disk as ``text only'', thus
obliterating the difference between subscripts and text, or between
different fonts.
\end{enumerate}

(If we had asked Ciro then, he could possibly have provided more
accurate computer files. By now, the world has moved on, and I doubt if
there is any word processor in existence that can read 1990s word
documents.)

The copy-editor was sensitive to the finer points of English grammar and
style, but not to mathematical content. For example, he would almost
certainly not spot the difference between Greek \(\tau\) and Latin
\(t\), or between \(\Sigma_i\) and \(\sum_i\) and \(Si\); there are
probably dozens of such errors in the files. He did not check
line-by-line against the original Italian, which I consider to be
essential for accuracy (a common mistake of translating math is to let
your eye slip from one "Let S be a surface .." to the next "Let S be a
surface ..", thus skipping whole lines of text).

The copy-editor's work is a big file in my office. It takes me a whole
evening's work to enter 10 pages of the corrections. (I would probably
speed up to 25 pages per evening if I spent a month on it.)

In addition to the problems with the current text of the translation,
the original book has problems of consistency, e.g., of references to
the works (for this, it should be possible to link these to Ciro's
database of Italian geometry papers, or to Jahresbericht der Deutschen
Mathematiker-Vereinigung (now presumably online). I guess that the
original book was a huge pile of papers (or several drawers full of
papers) in Enriques' office when he died, and were bundled together
hurriedly by Castelnuovo for publication. Some sections are probably a
lot rougher than others (e.g., the first couple of chapters should
really be thrown away).

M.R. Tue 11th Dec 2007

\tableofcontents
