One of our far-flung readers, Rik Kabel, questions my treatment of an 18th-century text in the “English doesn’t need your help” post:

First, thank you very much for your blog. I look forward to each new entry.

I do have copy-editing questions engendered by your quotation of Jonathan Swift in the entry “English doesn't need your help,” where you wrote:

Hysteria about The Danger to English is no novelty. Jonathan Swift, writing in an essay in The Tatler in 1710, bemoaned “the deplorable ignorance that hath for some years reigned among our English writers, the great depravity of our taste, and the continual corruption of our style.” He went on to say, “These two evils, ignorance and want of taste, have produced a third: I mean the continual corruption of our English tongue. …” He favored the establishment of an English Academy to govern the language, an idea that, fortunately, gained no traction.

First, a pedantic question: the ellipsis at the end of the quotation seems misplaced. Should it not precede the period? Swift’s sentence did not end at that point, and an ellipsis following a stop tells us little.

Second, a much more serious question about the nature of quotation. The original appearance of this in the Tatler was capitalized and punctuated differently (and used long s [ſ], but I’ll except that as an issue). Swift capitalized almost every noun. He used a semicolon where you have a colon, and included commas where we do not today, at least in American English. My question is, what is quotation? Does it require fidelity to the original form of the statement, and if not, how much rewriting does it allow? Do the standards vary by medium? What remediation, if any, should be taken when a medium does not support accurate reproduction of a quotation?

I am probably willing to forgo some of the ligatures found in earlier texts, and certainly the opening quotation marks for every printed line of a quotation. I am also willing to forgo artefacts of the printing process such as hyphenation and catchwords. But, should we change Bacon’s spelling, or substitute modern synonyms of the original word when the original word has changed meaning? I note that you preserve the archaic “hath” while eschewing the capitalization; is it perhaps this is because your source presented it in this way, and you did not have the original at hand?

I am studying, and writing a book on, quotation and misquotation. Restatement, elision of content, removal of context, changes in language over time, and misattribution are major issues; the added challenges of translation when the original statement was not in English are as well.

Well, yes, that period and ellipsis should probably have been reversed.

The second question is the one with meat on the bones.

I took the Swift text from an edition of Gulliver’s Travels and other works by Louis Landa, published by Houghton Mifflin under the Riverside Editions imprint. It has been in common use as a textbook; it was the text I used in Professor Arthur Hoffman’s Augustan Age class at Syracuse in 1979. Professor Landa modernizes the spelling, capitalization and punctuation; he eliminates much of the italicization to which 18th-century writers were addicted; and he forgoes the 18th-century typography — the ligatures, long s, &c. The intent, I assume, is to smooth the path for the modern reader by minimizing distractions.

My Norton Critical Edition of Swift’s work incudes the Tatler essay with the original capitalization, punctuation and italics — though also eliminating the period typography.

Modernizations of 17th- and 18th-century texts are fairly common. John Butt’s one-volume Pope from the Twickenham edition preserves the original capitalization, but not the typography. In the poems and major prose works of Milton edited for the Odyssey Press, Merritt Y. Hughes modernizes Milton’s orthography. (The Norton Critical Edition of Paradise Lost, I recall, does not.)

What to the modern eye are eccentricities of spelling, capitalization, punctuation and typography in works of that era are surely distracting, and few readers are likely to put in the time to accustom themselves to those texts. I can’t quarrel with an editorial effort that preserves the sense and tone of the original while making it more accessible to today’s reader.

Even so, I admit that something is lost in the process. Even the printer’s replacement of the long s with f in texts when the former letter was not available has a certain charm (though you might not immediately descry it in the headline for today’s post.) Once in Upstate New York, I was a guest in the home of a Presbyterian divine who had collected 18th-century editions at a time when they were relatively cheap. He had a set of the original serial volumes of Tristram Shandy, three of them bearing the author’s autograph, and he let me examine one of them. The binding, the paper and the printing were, with the text, part of a unified experience of the book, not quite duplicated by any modern edition.

But then, while I love the “authentic instrumentation” of period works, such as Nicholaus Harnoncourt’s recordings of Bach and others, I don’t object to modern performances. I once was in the audience at a Mostly Mozart concert at Lincoln Center when Lili Kraus came out to play as an encore the Rondo alla turca from Mozart’s A major piano sonata. She sat down at a Steinway grand and banged the bejeezus out of it. It was glorious.