On Thu, 14 May 1998, Alan Baker wrote:
> a licensed misreading.
Yesterday Massimo Bacigalupo from Genoa was in Durham giving a seminar on
problems of edition in Pound's Cantos - given the number of well-meaning
"friends" who've sought to "correct" Pound's "mistakes" - in many cases
against express documentary evidence of P's intent. So that current
editions are shedding, on the way, many layers of P's "meanings" (place
names which P deliberately gave in local form get translated into national
"koine"; deliberate and contemptuous misspelling of, say "pulitzer" as
"pullizer" get normalised etc). Given that there are no plans to
re-instated the (earlier) textually "correct" versions, i.e. those closer
to authorial intent, we get a new take on "licensed misreading" in this
instance, where the present "licensee" (the publisher) has actually
stripped out extra levels of meaning which had been originally "licensed"
by the poet. Pound was at least somewhat open to chance procedures, and
alert to the input which, say, printers could make to his work. But I
can't imagine he'd've approved such license where it actually *decreased*
options.
For my own part I'm happy to license almost any misreading of my work (but
not revisioning or "correcting"! - that's usually my stick) - my authority
to do this comes, of course, with my poetic license, which arrived after I
declared my authorial intent, which a friend suggests I might be arrested
for loitering with.
RC
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