The Editor's Dilemma: Conrad's Revisitings of His Works

G.W. Stephen Brodsky
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Abstract

Except for his revisitings of printed text in his own hand, few emendations can be known for sure to have been with Conrad’s approval or even knowledge. The trouble is compounded by there being two Conrads: the Conrad who came from the sea and became a published author in 1895 in his late thirties, and the seasoned author at almost twice that age in his early sixties, full of honors, who wrote most of his prefaces for collected editions of his previously published books in about 1919 to 1921. Additionally, the many variants among editions of Conrad’s texts owe their existence to house-style interventions, typing errors, typesetters’ lapses, and unwarranted interference with syntax, lexicon, and semantics by publishers’ editors. Moreover, differences between a publisher’s copy editor and a bibliographic editor lead to diverse editions. While the former aims to correct a text, improve its style, make a better book, even, of the raw preprint matter or a previously published edition, the latter aims not for a better book, but an authoritative one, as close as possible to the author’s intention; the task is not aesthetic or grammatical but forensic. The purpose of this paper is to challenge the very notion of the possibility of an authoritatively definitive text.

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编辑的困境:康拉德作品的重新审视
除了他亲自对印刷文本的重新审视之外,很少有修订是得到了康拉德的批准,甚至是知情的。麻烦的是有两个康拉德:一个是来自海上的康拉德,在1895年30多岁的时候成为了一名出版作家;另一个是经验丰富的作家,在60岁出头的时候,他的年龄几乎是康拉德的两倍,充满了荣誉,他在1919年到1921年左右为他以前出版的书的合集写了大部分序言。此外,康拉德文本版本之间的许多变体都要归功于家庭风格的干预、打字错误、排字工人的失误,以及出版商编辑对语法、词汇和语义的无理干涉。此外,出版商的文字编辑和书目编辑之间的差异导致了不同的版本。前者的目标是纠正文本,改进其风格,甚至是用原始的预印本或先前出版的版本制作一本更好的书,后者的目标不是一本更好的书,而是一本权威的书,尽可能接近作者的意图;这项任务不是美学的或语法的,而是法医的。本文的目的是挑战权威的确定性文本的可能性的概念。
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Contributors "Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality": A Possible Source for Under Western Eyes The Editor's Dilemma: Conrad's Revisitings of His Works "A lot of men too indolent for whist—and a story" The Telling Situation in "Youth," Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim Migration, Modernity and Transnationalism in the Work of Joseph Conrad ed. by Kim Salmons and Tania Zulli (review)
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