11-12-2019, 11:26 PM | #31 | |
A Hairy Wizard
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As a matter of fact, your question was answered by the very first person after your OP. Everyone else, except for one individual who is well known for presenting his opinion as fact and trying to impose it on everyone else, has agreed that you can do whatever you want with PD books. However, they have also given many reasons on why you should, or should not, do it. That is called a discussion. It is also meant to help other people who may read this thread in the future, not just yourself. It appears you just don't happen to like their opinions. If you don't wish to listen to dissenting opinion, then you of course have the right to take your ball... but, it is most definitely your loss. Many people are able to get all kinds of help from the people of this forum. Cheers, |
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11-13-2019, 04:34 AM | #32 | |
Whatever...
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11-13-2019, 05:34 AM | #33 | |
Whatever...
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I'm still willing to discuss the pros and cons of modernising orthography and fixing errors in PD books, and the possibility, or not, of knowing authors' intentions about how their texts should be published in future centuries. I think I am faithful to Mary Shelley's intentions when in The Last Man I leave the hyphen out of "to-day" - I do not think her intention was that 200 years later this spelling should give her text an outdated and somewhat quaint flavor. The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris, on the other hand, who uses a deliberately antiquated language, would suffer from such a change. BTW, I hadn't known about Danish, but it's the same in German. Publishing an 18th century text today with its original orthography is utterly out of the question, except maybe for the use of historians. Does anyone know about French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, etc.? |
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11-13-2019, 05:45 AM | #34 |
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Robert, how do we know your "modernization" is correct? That's part of the problem. If you get it wrong, you can change the meaning of the author.
A compromise would be to put out two versions. One as it was published and the other your version and let the reader decide which one to read. |
11-13-2019, 05:53 AM | #35 |
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I agree, and note that the person who issued that order has not apologised for, or even acknowledged, his error in making that command based on his unsupported and erroneous assumption that you were intending to upload your work here. Your feeling somewhat aggrieved in these circumstances is understandable.
Last edited by Uncle Robin; 11-13-2019 at 05:56 AM. |
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11-13-2019, 07:04 AM | #36 |
A Hairy Wizard
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This is the one individual to whom I was referring. He is very knowledgeable and often quite helpful. You just need to take his decrees with a very large grain of salt!
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11-13-2019, 07:25 AM | #37 |
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Also, apparently quite unaware of any need to admit when he's wrong after berating someone in terms bordering on the uncivil for something they hadn't done, and which was based on his own utterly unsupported assumptions. Being knowledgeable is no excuse for being arrogant and bullying. Perhaps saying "I was wrong, I'm sorry" falls outside the realm of things which a curmudgeon knows.
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11-13-2019, 08:11 AM | #38 | |
Whatever...
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All editing has to be done carefully, but modernizing orthography will rarely risk changing the meaning, particularly since in English only few words are spelled differently now than they were in the 18th or 19th century. Punctuation can be more challenging, and when you look at 19th century print editions you can find commas strewn across the text as if they'd been distributed with a salt shaker (and no, I'm not talking about specks in the paper turning into phantom OCR punctuation). Most corrections of all kinds of obvious errors will hopefully not go against the author's intentions, but I fully agree, each "error" has to be checked against the possibility that it had been intentional, and if in doubt, the correction should be documented. For reference I use the oldest print edition that I can lay my eyes on, but admittedly I search for scanned copies on the Internet and do not buy rare first editions from antique books sellers, nor do I search for them in libraries. Someone might be able to do a better job than I'm doing, but then, they'd probably ask to be paid for their efforts, or might limit their work to a smaller number of books. But this is something that the reader can already do - not that they need me to tell them, but on my website I have links to Project Gutenberg, Project Gutenberg Australia, Wikisource, The Online Books Page, Librivox, and the MobileRead Forum (all of which are far better known than my site, anyway) - there they can easily find different editions, which they may prefer to read. I'm not depriving anyone of their choice. |
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11-13-2019, 08:15 AM | #39 |
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11-13-2019, 09:31 PM | #40 | |
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The other thing you can do is post the eBook here and post a link to your website. That would get more visits to your site. If you post both a copy with and without modernization, then more people will read it as they have the choice of which version they want. |
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11-13-2019, 10:32 PM | #41 | |
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Hitch |
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11-14-2019, 09:11 AM | #42 | |
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I wouldn't be able to make two versions, a purist and an edited one, with "editing" and "correcting" neatly and unquestionably separated. And even if I could, making two separate editions would about double the amount of my work. With my own editions, I am only answerable to my own judgment. I want to keep it that way. I had not wanted to start this discussion, I had not remotely expected it to start - all I had wanted was to get an answer to a little problem that had vexed me, how to deal with a set of two conflicting rules, or at least to me they had seemed to conflict in the case in question. I have worked on my website and on my editions for ten years now, and, as long as I can, I'll keep working on them - this is not something I feel the need to compromise on. And as to the increased traffic I'd get, if most people here prefer the "purist" version, and I posted it here, then they woudn't go to my website for the edited version, would they? And since I don't have anything to sell (not even visitors' data to Google), more traffic isn't that important to me. No, I'll keep doing my work, and some will approve, and others won't, but they won't be harmed by it. |
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11-15-2019, 01:09 AM | #43 |
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11-15-2019, 03:16 AM | #44 |
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Though I'm a bit obsessive about original spellings etc. myself, I'll agree that modernization of spelling and punctuation is absolutely legitimate. Editors of classic texts have been doing it for ages. The older the text, the more the strangeness of spelling and punctuation can distract from the text itself, so I can understand every reader who prefers modernized spellings. I still remember vividly the time in 8th or 9th grade when we read one of Goethe's plays (I'm German) in the original spelling -- it took quite a while before we stopped making jokes about some of the -- to us -- weirdest spellings; I am sure we would have arrived at the content of the play sooner if we'd read it in modernized spelling.
And "original" spelling has its pitfalls too. Sometimes editors have felt entitled to make major changes, especially if they thought the writer lacked education (John Clare is a famous example). Or in German there's Heine, who for instance liked to spell his /ai/ sounds "ey", which was already becoming old-fashioned in his day, so many magazine editors who published his poetry modernized it to "ei." Some modern editors, aiming to be true to the author's intention, changed it back to "ey," even though some poems were never printed that way. Of course that is all well and good in a heavily footnoted critical edition, but how would you decide if you wanted to prepare a reading edition? Or, in the case of John Clare, on the one hand it is known that he had bitter arguments with his editor about some changes, but on the other hand nobody can say for sure if he really wanted to see all his spelling errors in print. Hence, there is no Golden Rule here, except: do what you like, best indicate your editing policy, and find happy readers. Last edited by doubleshuffle; 11-15-2019 at 03:18 AM. |
11-17-2019, 10:40 PM | #45 | |
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