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Humanist Archives: Dec. 8, 2019, 7:55 a.m. Humanist 33.469 - error-handling

                  Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 469.
            Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
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        Date: 2019-12-07 19:17:09+00:00
        From: Dr. Herbert Wender 
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.467:1: error handling by writers

To explain my persistent interest in the case of Zefer's decision - whether to
command the transformed representation, whether to accept an erratic typesetting
- it might be useful to say that I hold a lot of years my membership in the
german association ('Arbeitsgemeinschaft') of scholarly editors. The interesting
question: How a future scholarly edition of Zefer's poems will have to represent
this piece? Two other cases  came to my mind:

1) the famous anecdote reported by Ellman who tells that when it was obvious
that a 'Come in!' in Beckett's script of Joyce's dictate wasn't meant as part of
the text but addressed to a third person knocking on the door, the poet decided:
'Let it stand' (cf. Hugh B. Staples: Beckett in the "Wake". In: James Joyce
Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 4, Beckett Issue (Summer, 1971), pp. 421-424; here p.
421).

2) In research on the works of the german writer Uwe Johnson there was a
discussion about willingly placed printing 'errors' with potential to mislead
agents of censorship.
(BTW: error tracing was a Lachmannian  key concept ;-)

Herbert -----Ursprüngliche Mitteilung-----..

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Date: 2019-12-06 13:28:06+00:00
  From: Francois Lachance 
  Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.461: failure of another sort

It is interesting to surmise that the poet is covering for the publisher
post facto. But the book appeared in 2016 -- after the period that Alec
McAllister describes -- when the software had improved to the point where
it is unlikely that the effect was due to mere accident.

Regardless of the origin of the challenge, a translator facing the
"un-translation" in Zaher's text and respecting what is presented could
provide a version all in capital letters, no spaces and displayed in
mirror fashion which would preserve the "making strange".

Given the number of deviations from "readable" presentation, I believe
that the deliberate choice came early in the composition/publication
process and was in part a function of the shadow cast by machine...





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