Rome

Rome is the point of discovery and the first stage of the documentary history behind The Reincarnationist Papers: in the city, D. Eric Maikranz bought three numbered notebooks, began translating them, and later investigated the claims in their narrative.

Discovery on via dei Coronari

At the turn of the millennium, Maikranz was living in Rome and researching his first book, Insider’s Rome, a guide to some of the city’s less familiar sites. In an antique shop on medieval via dei Coronari, just off Piazza Navona, he noticed three plain, weathered notebooks that seemed out of place and not quite old enough to be antiques. They had no title, only the numbers one, two, and three. The first was filled with Cyrillic handwriting. Because Maikranz spoke Russian, he could recognize the script but not the language; he bought all three notebooks for 20,000 lire, about US$10 at the time.

Translation in the city

Maikranz’s first attempts to translate the notebooks did not resolve their language. He eventually narrowed it to Serbian, Bulgarian, or Ukrainian, but knew it was not Russian. Following a hunch, he went to the Bulgarian Embassy on Via Pietro Rubens, north of the Borghese. A receptionist confirmed that the handwriting was Bulgarian and agreed to help with the translation after reading the opening pages.

Over the summer, Marina Lizhiva translated aloud while Maikranz typed. Their work unfolded during evening sessions in his apartment on Caio Mario, near the Vatican. Rome thus became more than the place where the notebooks surfaced: it was also where their uncertain script became a readable account through a collaboration between a reader and a translator.

From discovery to verification

After the translation was complete, Maikranz began researching what he could verify about Evan’s claim. He recorded that research in footnotes, describing it as the only editorial work required after translation. The route from the antique shop to the footnotes gives Rome a framing role in the book: the city marks the transition from an unexplained set of notebooks to a translated text whose assertions the editor sought to test. The explanatory account establishes this provenance and process, rather than identifying Rome as a setting for the events narrated in the notebooks.