I was reading the old Uncle Remus books and I found a version where they were “re-written” so the dialect used is easier to understand.
Unfortunately most of the book was also rewritten to make it more politically correct. And whole sections were either omitted or depreciated.
So my question is what do you think of this? On one hand I can see the point. Things like Shakespear are hard to read (but not impossible) and perhaps it would be better to have them rewritten in contemporary language. I mean isn’t it better to have them read that way than not read at all? Or maybe it isn’t?
I found reading books like “The Scarlett Letter,” were a lot easier to read if I just listened to them via a book on tape. For some odd reason, to me, when someone reads the exact same words out loud, they are easy to understand.
The Uncle Remus books especially to me, make sense when I read them aloud.
I also think it’s important for people and children to learn to read a book in the context of the time period of which it is written. So children can understand what it was like to live when technologies weren’t around. Such as phones or movies or whatever.
Hmmm, I don’t know. On one hand, as long as you don’t pretend that it’s anything but a modern re-interpretation, I don’t see why it’s innately wrong. People are writing modern interpretations of old stories all the time; the various versions of the King Arthur stories, for example. And like you say, perhaps it’s better to have it read in modernized form than not at all.
On the other hand, you’ll generally lose something “in translation”, I would assume. Unless the person doing the “translation” is as good as the original author, which is unlikely. And rendering it more PC is just modern bowdlerization.
I think that a lot of books would benefit from a lot of annotation. I can enjoy Shakespeare only if I know what all the little pop culture references are.
Mostly, I read books as they were written, and I don’t think that they could be rewritten. However, I generally only read books that were written within the past 150 years or so, and so I understand most of the pop culture references. Most of the older books that I read would lose most or even all of their interest if they were rewritten to modern sensibilities.
I think the words should be left alone, but I’d be okay with tweaking the punctuation. I dumped Wuthering Heights in the first few pages. The excess (IMO) colons, semicolons, and commas disrupted the flow.
Maybe that’s why it was easier to enjoy The Scarlet Letter – we don’t hear the punctuation. Same with Shakespeare – difficult to read, easier to listen to.
Shakespeare, in my opinion, is a bad example for books that could be “re-written.” Unlike many other authors, one of the things that made Shakespeare’s writing so compelling was the poetry of the language itself. I agree with AuntiePam that Shakespeare’s much easier to listen to than to read (although I probably get more out of a reading in the end)–it makes sense, considering he was a dramatist.
So long as the originals are preserved and avalible as well. If I read a ‘rewritten’ book that I enjoyed, I’d still like to be able to find it in it’s original form to get a better grasp on the author’s message.
It’s probably easier to understand a (well-done) audio book because the inflection and emotion gives vital clues to meaning. One example that leaps to mind is Mr. Bennet “thanking” Mary for her performance at the party. If you’re not hip to Regency syntax, you’re probably struggling to just untangle the sentences enough to understand the bare meaning. You might think he was being sincere and nice. But if a good reader/actor reads the line with noticeable sarcasm and scorn, you’ll easily understand why it made Elizabeth cringe - not only was her sister making a fool of herself, their father tried to fix it by loudly being an asshole to her.
And that brings me to the question at hand - in some ways Jane Austen is a great argument for re-writing. As I’ve said before, her sentence structure is obtuse and ridiculously complex. If you can get used to it so you aren’t struggling through every paragraph, Pride & Prejudice becomes a hilarious page-turner. But then again, I don’t know how one would re-write it with modern style and keep her brilliance. It would be a tall order.
I just skipped to the end of Vanity Fair, because I became bored with the stale cultural references. Just as no one will care about or be amused by 95% of SNL sketches 150 years from now, I just got tired of moments that were clearly “nudge, nudge, aren’t I being deliciously satirical and snarky?” but which were impossible to appreciate because I’m not a contemporary. That’s a much more difficult issue to work around - you can’t re-write it without destroying the substance. I guess that’s what abridgments attempt - present the core story and the more enduring bits, and excise things that have not stood the test of time. But of course no one agrees on what should be kept.
This subject came up when I was in library school. Some old children’s books have been rewritten to bring them into line with modern values (mostly removing elements now considered extremely racist), and these editions are not always labeled as having been revised. My professor was of the opinion that this should not be done, and that if parents or teachers felt the original Dr. Dolittle was offensive they should just read some other book to the kids. I’m inclined to agree. It’s not as if there’s a shortage of books in the world.
I don’t think this is a fair description of Austen at all. I first read Pride and Prejudice at age 15 or 16 and didn’t find it difficult or obtuse even then. When her sentence structure is “ridiculously complex” it is generally because she intended it to be ridiculous, as in the famous opening lines of P&P. It isn’t as if every line is written that way. P&P immediately moves on to a straightforward dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Bennett. Some adjustments to the punctuation, as AuntiePam suggested, might improve readability, but beyond that I’d say Austen is one of the “classic” novelists LEAST in need of rewriting.
I wouldn’t call Joel Chandler Harris’s books old by any stretch. Can you read the *Gettysburg Address *or *The Adventures of Mark Twain *without problem? They are rough contemporaries of the Uncle Remus stories and yet are written in fairly plain English.
I think the problem lies with the way that Harris depicts the speech of the slaves from whom he had heard the stories to begin with. You can indicate accents with a conversational preface like, “in a thick Irish brogue Paddy said, 'I’m thinking you’re not all the man you’re cracked up to be.” The alternative is, Paddy said, “Oim tinkin’ yoor nat awl te man yoor crict op ta be.” (Apologies to my Irish cousins.)
So Harris chose to write in the second style, preserving the accents of the slaves from whom he had heard the tales. They need to be read aloud, which is the way Harris heard them as a young man. The spelling’s not so important since Harris was writing phonetically. And when **I **become Disney CEO…
The same holds true for Shakespeare in a number of instances. He might write a characters line in the spelling that would indicate the particular pronunciation. I’m going to post this, but if anyone’s curious I can dredge up a few examples.
Hmm. Perhaps P&P is actually easier than some of her other novels? I had read S&S and Emma first, and felt like I had to do some pretty heavy lifting with those. Then I read Northanger Abbey, and discovered a sentence so crazy that the editor of the book had misinterpreted in a footnote. I had to read the sentence at least four times to parse it properly. I may have simply assumed I did fine with P&P because I had gotten the hang of it with her other work first, when in fact the style is objectively clearer and simpler.
There’s no denying that Shakespeare is antiquated. A lot of his turns of phrase are wonderful, but others require extensive footnoting. Nevertheless, in context it’s pretty clear – I’ve never gotten lost while watching a performance of a Shakespeare play.
People from other countries, though, get Shakespeare translated into “contemporary” language. They see what is arguably a more accessible Shakespeare. we translate Chaucer and Beowulf into modetn English, so why not?
My argument (which I’ve posted here before): There was a line of “translated into modern” Shakespeare plys about 30 years ago, with facing pages having “traditional” text and “modern” text.
In Hamlet the line “Angles and Ministers of Grace Defend us!” was translated as
Here’s a randomly selected couple of paragraphs from Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus:
The surrounding narrative isn’t at all difficult, but the attempt to reproduce Uncle Remus’s own speech is very hard to read, at least until you’ve read enough of it that you get the feel for it.
From what I understand, it wasn’t at all uncommon in nineteenth century writing (at least in America) to have this sort of written attempt at reproducing dialogue. See, for example, the works of Finley Peter Dunne (and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for a relatively mild, readable example). It may have made it easier for someone who was reading aloud and trying to get the accent right, but it’s really hard for modern readers to work their way through. This is one place where it really helps to have an audio version read by someone who knows what they’re doing. But if I had to read it for myself, I wouldn’t mind a bit of modernizing of the spelling, sacrificing authenticity for readability.
I don’t remember having any difficulty with Sense and Sensibility, but the beginning part of Emma is pretty widely considered the worst opening of any of Austen’s novels. I think that’s more due to it being boring than to the actual sentence structure, but it could be both. The first time I attempted Emma I abandoned it a couple of chapters in and didn’t come back to it until months later.
*I don’t know what sentence you’re referring to, but since Northanger Abbey was in many ways a parody of Gothic novels it might have been some kind of joke about a particular book that didn’t come across well. It may also have been an example of amateurish writing or poor revision. Northanger Abbey is an odd case because it was both the first full-length novel that Austen completed and the last to be published. She sold the publishing rights fairly early on, but this publisher never actually printed the novel.
Austen managed to buy back the rights more than a decade later and made some revisions to the text, but she abandoned the project to focus on writing her last novel, Persuasion. Austen died a year later, her brother re-sold the rights to Northanger Abbey, and it was finally published posthumously.
All this means that the text we have of Northanger Abbey today is not something that Austen herself considered ready for publication. I think her biggest concern about the book was that the cultural references had become outdated, but in the years that had passed she’d also become a more experienced writer and likely wanted to rewrite some passages for stylistic reasons. I’m only guessing here, but it might be that the particularly odd sentence you found was something she intended to change or had already partially (but only partially) rewritten when she set the book aside. I know I’ve wound up with some pretty crazy sentences that way, and when proofreading sometimes have to think a bit to remember what on earth I actually meant to say.
The Fairie Queene by Edmund Spenser, written in 1596, has a lot of fantastic stories in it, but the text can be extremely difficult to understand at times. There is definitely a wonderful poetry to it, and after a while you get used to the Us in place of Vs, as in “he loued her” instead of “he loved her” or Is in place of Js, but truthfully, the actual stories being told can be hard to pick out from the poetry of it.
This site has a great collection of stories from that work, but re-written in Victorian-era prose by a woman named Mary Macleod.
I was tempted to mention The Faerie Queene. I read some parts of it in an anthology once and rather liked it—but the version I read had modernized the spelling. Later, when I tried to read some of it in the original spelling, I found it too hard to be worth plowing through.
I don’t want it in prose; I want Spenser’s poetry. I just don’t want to have to struggle with that antiquated spelling.
No, they shouldn’t. Books should be translated into different languages to make them available to people who otherwise wouldn’t be plausibly capable of reading them (eg, I would not have been able to read Goethe’s Faust without extensive prep study had someone not translated it). Books should not be ‘translated’ into more modern language simply to make them easier to read. The author wrote it the way they did for a specific reason; any change dilutes it and that shouldn’t be done frivolously.
As a curious reversal of that, in the Spanish language, the famous bit of “To be or not to be” from Shakespeare’s Hamlet was translated originally as “Existir o no existir” that is “To exist or not to exist”
But more popular (and modern) translations won over, so current Spanish versions use “Ser o no ser” (To be or not to be).
For some reason, I can’t read that and not think “Nac Mac Feegle !”. I’m so nekulturny, I know.
That said, while I haven’t read the book, I think much would be lost by translating this into plain english. But then, I’m very fond of transcribed accents and “written speech” in general, so I’m not unbiased there.