Reminds me of Winston’s job in 1984. Like revising history to match what it should have been if they had been as smart as we are now.
On the other hand, they didn’t write them to be slogged through by people who had to puzzle out what they were saying. Yes, change dilutes it; but the changing of language over time has done that already. I don’t think there’s any ideal solution here, personally.
Maybe you’re kidding, but there really is a Jason Fforde book called, “First Among Sequels”.
I think it is mistake for most modern readers to read Shakespeare silently. It improves remarkably when read out loud and even more so when acted. Rewriting is insane.
Old books should not be rewritten. Old books should be annotated by experts, to give readers the information they need to appreciate and understand the original. Cf. The Annotated Alice, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, etc.
I can see redoing for dialect / spelling; the translations of the Bible that we use in Spanish are pretty recent, usually; I can understand the Poem of Mio Cid in the oldest preserved spelling but it’s a lot easier when the spelling has been modernized (in this case, you get the old version on one page and the modernized one across it, and the poetry isn’t lost at all).
But I hate, hate, hate versions of Little Red Riding Hood where at the end the Big Bad Wolf is dancing with Grandma, ok?
When I was little, I used to dream of being Wendy and flying away; I didn’t really like Peter Pan a lot, but he wasn’t so different from the boys I was always taking care of in real life. I didn’t find a pre-Disney version of the book until I was 20: Peter is a complete moron!
Years ago, a local theater group presented a series of Shakespeare plays. Hey–no royalties & he’s still packing them in! I’d never read or seen King Lear, so I purchased a Cliffs Notes edition. It included the full text of the play, with definitions & other explanatory notes on each page. Plus some old engravings for atmosphere. It was fun to read & probably helped me get into the play. But the production was excellent & caught me up, anyway: “Aah, he’s going to put out his eyes!”
There’s also the approach used by Shakespeare Retold, in which the BBC produced modern stories based on Shakespeare. Not really translations, but plays on the plots (that Willy stole in the first place). Great fun for someone with knowledge of the originals. The excellent cast helped a great deal.
Shakespeare is worth just a bit of trouble. Spenser, not so much…
ETA: I could get behind removing dreadful “dialect”–try to communicate a different speaking style, but spell correctly!
I’d have no problem with somebody rewriting Ethan Frome to make it less effing boring.
I guess I feel that an author writes a book (or play, or poem, or whatever) in precisely the way they mean to write it. Is it easier to read a modernization of the Canterbury Tales than the original? Sure. Is it therefore better? Not at all. There’s a difference between literature and a crappy mystery novel you pick up in the airport: literature should make you work for it. If you don’t need to think, then you’re not going to get anything from the book your reading.
I feel that there is substantial good to be gained by rewriting.
Consider an old work that was written in English and translated to Spanish. The English readers have little choice but to struggle with archaic language; however, the author probably never intended the language to be anything but contemporary. The Spanish readers are probably at an initial disadvantage because they aren’t reading the original work, but two hundred years later, they are likely reading a fresh translation, while the English readers slog on.
Of course, the PC angle is an entirely different, but inseparable issue.
There are plenty of old & dreadful translations floating around.
Please–explain “the PC angle.”
I don’t like the idea of rewriting the old books, but I have no problem with new interpretations of them.
For example, Larry Niven’s Inferno makes no attempt to replace or rewrite Dante’s (in fact, it becomes curiously self-referential), but it’s a good story all by itself.
Grendel tells the tale of Beowulf from a different point of view without attempting to rewrite the original.
Modern interpretations of classic stories abound, and I think that’s wonderful. It was a movie (I can’t remember the name of it at the moment) based loosely on the story of the Odyssey that got my kids interested in reading Homer.
+1
Actually, I love Shakespeare as audio performances, they were originally plays, and should be watched more than read. My english prof in high school had us watch the plays with the text books at hand. He also had us read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales out loud in class to help study it [if you allow for the shift in pronunciation, it is actually fairly comprehensible when read out loud.]
I love books written with dialect or slang, half the fun is puzzling it out - such as Clockwork Orange, written in some bastardization of soviet and brit slang that Burgess invented.
O Brother Where Art Thou was based loosely on the Odyssey. Very loosely!
Homer’s Daughter by Robert Graves was his own (erudite, ingenious) take on the story.
Neither of these works would be a good substitute for reading the text for a class. But they are both great fun if you’ve already done the work.
I agree that good literature require work on the part of the reader, but that doesn’t mean that any increase in difficulty has to increase the value to the reader. In fact I think that the harder the work is to decode the less work the reader can put into appreciating what makes it good literature in the first place.
Language changes and eventually it only makes sense to treat an older work as if it were in a foreign language. Though I expect there will be great disagreement on whether or not any particular work has crossed the may-as-well-be-in-Greek line.
While I won’t argue about frivolity, the rest of that sentence is so much poppycock. The end result of this little idea is that any editing is diluting the work, and I’m fairly confident that you think that editing is still a useful thing in the production of any written work. Not every author writes as a stylistic exercise, and only a very few choose the dialect they use deliberately. When the dialect becomes so obscure that one needs significant scholarship to understand it, modernization seems to be reasonable, and required if the work is to be understood outside of the scholarly world.
If you don’t want to think, then you’re probably not getting everything out of even the “crappiest” piece of genre fiction. On the other hand, I don’t really have the time to spend teaching myself Old English, should I just skip Beowulf? I’m not going to understand the text to the depth Tolkien did, but I’m still going to get more out of a translation than I would out of the original text, in that sense that I will get something out of the translation.
I believe, very strongly, that making something accessible is a good thing. There’s enough depth to Chaucer that using only words found in Merriam-Webster leaves enough to understand him. Such a “translation” allows those of us are not able to spend years of our lives studying the language of a given era a view through the same window as those who can devote time to such an endeavor, even if our window is less clear than yours. Would you rather keep that view to yourself, limited to only those who possess the gnosis of the language and history that you have access to? Or would you share the view, and perhaps inspire some few others to reach of the clear view?
This isn’t to say that most modernizations fail to be anything other than insipid. There’s a difference between using words I can find without being a scholar of the English language, and having the tale tellers in the Decameron drinking a Coke.
And the good thing about bad translations is that they can be translated anew with limited fuss (unless they are treated as the One and Only Perfect Translation)
By the “PC angle” I mean what folks were talking about up-thread: do you perform editing based on modern social norms, softening offensive racism, for example. I imagine the answer to that one will usually be “It depends…”
O Brother Where Art Thou is what I was thinking of. The great thing about it, as I mentioned above, is that it made my son want to read the Odyssey–and he enjoyed it!
I respectfully disagree.
I don’t believe that most good literature was originally written to be inaccessible or to make readers work hard at it. I think Shakespeare, for example, was pretty darned easy for the people of his time–it’s only difficult now if you aren’t familiar with the language and customs from back then.
I feel that great literature at the time it’s written should be clearly-written, not obtuse. Books written specifically so that they will be hard to follow strike me as vaguely elitist–although sometimes they can be a great deal of fun to puzzle through.
My wife recommended Wuthering Heights to me. I tried to read it but didn’t get far. When she asked me what I thought I replied
“Too many goddamn semicolons” After a dozen pages I was actually counting them to see how many the average per page was. She honestly had no idea what I was talking about. She has re-read the book a dozen times and never noticed it.
**Annotation **is a great idea. “Translating”/updating and, god forbid, bowdlerization are unacceptable. Note the quotation marks–when a language has evolved to the point where the old version no longer intelligible to a current native speaker, then translation is acceptable. (*Beowulf *should be translated; *The Canturbury Tales *should be annotated.)
I disagree. It’s a chore to read something and have to keep looking back and forth between the main text and the margins, bottom of the page, or (God forbid) end of the book. It totally messes up the flow, especially with poetry.
What annotation is good for is enhancing one’s appreciation of a work, not for making the unreadable readable. (How would you annotate the Uncle Remus paragraphs I quoted earlier?) It’s like watching a DVD with the commentary track on. A good annotation might explain the occasional unfamiliar word or phrase, or explain a once-familiar reference so that modern audiences can get the joke or understand the point. Sigmagirl mentioned The Annotated Alice and The Annotated Sherlock Holmes. These are books that are already written in a clear, fairly modern and uncomplicated style, so that the annotations aren’t needed to appreciate the books. The annotations are fun and helpful, but they’re not there to make up for impenetrable style, vocabulary, or dialect.