From dlupher@ups.edu Wed May 15 11:19:44 2002 Received: from mailscan3.cac.washington.edu (mailscan3.cac.washington.edu [140.142.32.15]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.01) with SMTP id g4FIJfw3074136 for ; Wed, 15 May 2002 11:19:41 -0700 Received: FROM mxu4.u.washington.edu BY mailscan3.cac.washington.edu ; Wed May 15 11:19:41 2002 -0700 Received: from mail.ups.edu (mail.ups.edu [192.124.98.111]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.01) with ESMTP id g4FIJepl019612 for ; Wed, 15 May 2002 11:19:40 -0700 Received: from [207.207.116.56] (wyatt1dhcp56.ups.edu [207.207.116.56]) by mail.ups.edu (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g4FIJd909719 for ; Wed, 15 May 2002 11:19:39 -0700 (PDT) X-Sender: dlupher@mail.ups.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <000001c1fc32$35ebe160$b8ec1ec4@al40> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Wed, 15 May 2002 11:19:39 -0700 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: David Lupher Subject: Re: How not to proof-read Terrence Lockyer writes: >Is it merely my imagination, or are the presses growing more careless by the >year? The following appear in the introductions to recent translations from >two major UPs: Well, if you're collecting typos from early on in a book, it's hard to beat the first sentence of W.H. Auden's "Secondary Worlds," published back in the good old days (1968) by Random House: "In myth, history and literature, we meet four kinds of human beings, of when it may be said that their deaths are the most significant events in their lives..." What bothers me even more than a typo is a howler that the publishers refuse to correct even when the book goes into multiple printings and editions. Here are a couple of my "favorites," both of them from key passages in their respective works, both of them translations consumed by the hundreds in undergraduate courses. - Desmond Lee's Penguin translation of Plato's "Republic" offers this as the last sentence of the "Noble Lie" (415C): "And this they must do because there is a prophecy that the State will be ruined when it has Guardians of silver or bronze." I am ashamed to say that I taught this several times before a student (now an excellent elementary school teacher) pointed out that "silver" must surely be a mistake for "iron." And she was right, of course. But though this translation has since then be re-set into a new edition with new print, pagination, cover, etc., the error remains in all its pristine glory. - Walter Kaufmann's translation of Nietzsche's "Birth of Tragedy" offers this rendition of one of the key sentences in the book, no less than the definition of tragedy in sect. 8 (Vintage ed., p. 75): "Thus the drama is the Dionysian embodiment of Dionysian insights and effects and thereby separated, as by a tremendous chasm, from the epic." "The Dionysian embodiment" renders, of course, "die apollinische Versinnlichung." My copy was printed in the late '60's (again, the good old days), but my students inform me that their nice new texts sport the same howler. And while we're at it, how severely should we judge the editing that allows this sort of thing by: "For as they [sc. French Renaissance tourists] gazed on the ruins of Rome, they must have experienced the same perplexed and uncanny feelings as those Aeneas felt when---from the underworld---he looked about him and saw the site of Rome with its overgrown ruins..." (Margaret M. McGowan, "The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France," Yale Univ. Press, 2000, p. 3)? To answer my own question: not very severely, perhaps. (I say this apotropaically. List-member George Pesely just yesterday pointed out two bloopers in some prose of mine which is fast reaching the Point of No Fixing.) David Lupher Classics Dept. Univ. of Puget Sound .