Nuevos Modos De Defenderse En La Calle Con Un Baston
I thought I would share with y'all a little bit about the major project I've been working on lately.
There exists a book, known to various online martial arts communities and likely virtually unknown offline, that very few people have seen. First brought to light a decade or so ago by a combatives expert - and very prolific collector of self-defense materials - from New York, this very rare book was written by an Argentinian fencing master and published in Buenos Aires in 1930. It details a system of self-defense with the walking stick that is unique among Western methods.
The basis of the system is striking with the cane held in reverse grip - think hiking staff grip rather than sword or baseball bat. The idea is that if you are surprised at close quarters, the manner in which you are already carrying the weapon (a knob-topped cane rather than a crook-handled one works best) is already suited to delivering highly non-telegraphic strikes, without the need to effect a major change of hand position or raise the cane up.
While the syllabi of some schools of ninjutsu and Filipino stickfighting contain some reverse grip methods, this is the only Western system I have seen with such techniques and certainly the only publication anywhere that I know of which uses them as a basis.
Now, when I say this book is rare, I don't mean that it's rare but you can get one if you're willing to shell out a hundred or two to a bookseller on Amazon. I mean it's rare as in Worldcat, which indexes 71,000 libraries in 112 countries, doesn't even have an entry for it. Aside from the copy in New York, I know that a savate teacher in France owns one, the author of this webpage in Slovakia has one, and I believe that a well-known savate/cane/self-defense teacher in Australia has a photocopy of one of the others.
Oh, and guess who else has one?
I wish I could tell you that it was bequeathed to me by an ancient master of the cane, or even that I found it in the back of a dusty, antiquated bookstore. But the truth is that it popped up on eBay one day, and I was first to the punch with a Buy It Now price of 70 US dollars. A bargain for something that appears to be absent from the collections of every major library in the world.
There are quite a lot of people interested in the contents of this book, as so far the only information that has made it onto the internet has been a set of photos of half a dozen or so of the pages. So, I thought, why not give something back to the community and release a reproduction. In fact, why not go one step further and do a translation to go alongside it too? Only one problem, I don't read Spanish.
One solution to this problem: learn to read Spanish. And so this is what I have been doing for the past few months. It's not as much of a daunting task as you might imagine - I studied French for eight years and Latin for eight years, as well as Ancient Greek for four years and German for one. This has given me an excellent base for further language acquisition, particularly as Spanish is a Romance language like French, and enough study of Latin gives anyone the tools they need to handle the logic and grammar of language. I already understand, for example, what a present participle is or how indirect object pronouns work - all I need to do is recognise how these things are done in Spanish.
I am also lucky to have some good resources - I work with a bilingual Argentinian, and one of my acquaintances is a very skilled martial artist with 30+ years experience who also happens to be fluent in Spanish. With them checking my work, and bearing in mind that this is a martial arts how-to book and not high literature, I shouldn't have too much of a problem.
I thought that the whole process of translation, working through and training the material, trying to find a publisher, etc. would make for a good blog, so expect to see that starting up in a few weeks when I begin translation. Currently I'm still working through the textbook, drilling grammar exercises, and all that good stuff.
I'm also thinking about doing a companion volume which expands on what's written in the book and gives additional suggestions for those who want to actually train in the system. Combatives and their training methods have come a long way in the last eighty years, so I thought this might be a fun related project. Many self-defense books I have seen are little more than a list of techniques - "he does this, so you do that". However, if I may steal from Carl Sagan, the beauty of a martial system is not the techniques that go into it, but the way those techniques are put together. In other words, what are the principles that glue the whole thing together? Footwork, body mechanics, distance, timing. I don't know yet to what extent the book does go into these things, but I'm sure there's stuff that can be added.
There exists a book, known to various online martial arts communities and likely virtually unknown offline, that very few people have seen. First brought to light a decade or so ago by a combatives expert - and very prolific collector of self-defense materials - from New York, this very rare book was written by an Argentinian fencing master and published in Buenos Aires in 1930. It details a system of self-defense with the walking stick that is unique among Western methods.
The basis of the system is striking with the cane held in reverse grip - think hiking staff grip rather than sword or baseball bat. The idea is that if you are surprised at close quarters, the manner in which you are already carrying the weapon (a knob-topped cane rather than a crook-handled one works best) is already suited to delivering highly non-telegraphic strikes, without the need to effect a major change of hand position or raise the cane up.
While the syllabi of some schools of ninjutsu and Filipino stickfighting contain some reverse grip methods, this is the only Western system I have seen with such techniques and certainly the only publication anywhere that I know of which uses them as a basis.
Now, when I say this book is rare, I don't mean that it's rare but you can get one if you're willing to shell out a hundred or two to a bookseller on Amazon. I mean it's rare as in Worldcat, which indexes 71,000 libraries in 112 countries, doesn't even have an entry for it. Aside from the copy in New York, I know that a savate teacher in France owns one, the author of this webpage in Slovakia has one, and I believe that a well-known savate/cane/self-defense teacher in Australia has a photocopy of one of the others.
Oh, and guess who else has one?
I wish I could tell you that it was bequeathed to me by an ancient master of the cane, or even that I found it in the back of a dusty, antiquated bookstore. But the truth is that it popped up on eBay one day, and I was first to the punch with a Buy It Now price of 70 US dollars. A bargain for something that appears to be absent from the collections of every major library in the world.
There are quite a lot of people interested in the contents of this book, as so far the only information that has made it onto the internet has been a set of photos of half a dozen or so of the pages. So, I thought, why not give something back to the community and release a reproduction. In fact, why not go one step further and do a translation to go alongside it too? Only one problem, I don't read Spanish.
One solution to this problem: learn to read Spanish. And so this is what I have been doing for the past few months. It's not as much of a daunting task as you might imagine - I studied French for eight years and Latin for eight years, as well as Ancient Greek for four years and German for one. This has given me an excellent base for further language acquisition, particularly as Spanish is a Romance language like French, and enough study of Latin gives anyone the tools they need to handle the logic and grammar of language. I already understand, for example, what a present participle is or how indirect object pronouns work - all I need to do is recognise how these things are done in Spanish.
I am also lucky to have some good resources - I work with a bilingual Argentinian, and one of my acquaintances is a very skilled martial artist with 30+ years experience who also happens to be fluent in Spanish. With them checking my work, and bearing in mind that this is a martial arts how-to book and not high literature, I shouldn't have too much of a problem.
I thought that the whole process of translation, working through and training the material, trying to find a publisher, etc. would make for a good blog, so expect to see that starting up in a few weeks when I begin translation. Currently I'm still working through the textbook, drilling grammar exercises, and all that good stuff.
I'm also thinking about doing a companion volume which expands on what's written in the book and gives additional suggestions for those who want to actually train in the system. Combatives and their training methods have come a long way in the last eighty years, so I thought this might be a fun related project. Many self-defense books I have seen are little more than a list of techniques - "he does this, so you do that". However, if I may steal from Carl Sagan, the beauty of a martial system is not the techniques that go into it, but the way those techniques are put together. In other words, what are the principles that glue the whole thing together? Footwork, body mechanics, distance, timing. I don't know yet to what extent the book does go into these things, but I'm sure there's stuff that can be added.