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Contributed by Feng Yuanya
It has been nearly seventy years since Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Hemingway's death, scholars also analyzed the reasons for his suicide from his personal letters.
Hemingway's sojourn in various countries, his love of spirits, and his love of fighting are still touted, but the works he published on which he stood are still full of proofreading and printing errors that have not been corrected.
Robert S. Robert W. Trogdon, Professor of English Literature at Kent State University, was a leading researcher of twentieth-century American literature. Troden's research interests include literary schools, documentation, and publication history, and he pays particular attention to editorial errors in the publishing process. Perusing and collating Hemingway's manuscripts at the Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Troden called for a re-editing of Hemingway's novels faithful to the original.
In an interview with The Guardian, Troden used Hemingway's early short story "A Way You'll Never Be" as an example, pointing out that hats were mistaken for bats. Similar spelling errors are not uncommon, especially in the English spelling of people's names and place names.
Other errors, stemming from the negligence of the typesetters, are mostly due to the erroneous alteration of punctuation and verb tenses during the typesetting process. For example, in The Sun Also Rises, the "q" is typeset as "g": the Parisian restaurant Cigogne is mistakenly spelled Ciqoque by the publisher; or the "L" is typeset as "S", and the matador "Marcial Lalanda" is mistaken for "Marcial Salanda", which has not yet been corrected.
For writing, Hemingway tends to be careful with words, especially with punctuation or temporality. Therefore, the erroneous tampering of the English version particularly affects the reading and comprehension of literary works. For example, in Hemingway's 1933 short story The Light of the World, the correct version of the phrase "She just keep on laughing and shaking" should be "She just kept on laughing and shaking", editing and typographing changed Hemingway's tense.
Hemingway, American writer, 1899-1961
Troden's latest work on the text of Hemingway's work will be included in The New Hemingway Studies, published this month by Cambridge University Press. In an article titled Hemingway and The Study of Texts, Troden notes: "For various reasons, his novels, short stories, and non-fiction novels are full of errors. Professor Kirk Curnutt, co-editor of The New Hemingway Study, said: "Something as simple as the distinction between 'b' and 'h' can change the whole meaning... It's surprising to understand the fragility of the text. ”
In addition, Troden points out that with the exception of Under Kilimanjaro (2005) and A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition (2009), no new edition of Hemingway's work has been dedicated to correcting editorial errors, while the publications of literary giants such as Fitzgerald and Faulkner have been systematically corrected.
Hemingway's publications have always been a conundrum for cultural scholars, for complex reasons. In the eyes of many scholars and literary enthusiasts, Hemingway's literary career declined prematurely in the 1940s. Since his short stay in Paris in the 1920s, Hemingway has lived in various countries as a journalist, delving into important historical events such as the Spanish War of Independence and World War II, and changing the trajectory of English literature with concise and tense words.
The Nobel Literary Committee summed up his style as "a mighty narrative, concise dialogue, and highly restrained depictions," and the authoritative Hemingway scholar G.T. Thompson. Dempsy) has written many articles analyzing his short stories, arguing that his outstanding works eliminate emotional and psychological descriptions, and create a high sense of substitution through action and scene descriptions. Hemingway believed that personal experience was difficult to convey, and that writers should replicate highly credible scenes to trigger empathy for the reader. To a large extent, Hemingway's principles of realism, concise and even sometimes crude literary style, and in-depth portrayal of subjects such as war and aborigines have benefited from extensive travel and professional training in reporting writing.
The New Hemingway Study, Cambridge University Press, August 2020.
In Justice for Ernst Hemingway, Dempsey meticulously compares Hemingway's work around the 1940s and finds that having lost his personal experience of historical conflicts and the nourishment of his journalistic career, Hemingway's later works clearly violated his own creative principles: long sentences became more and more complex, full of diseaseless groans and empty heroism, and psychological depictions began to appear. The Old Man and the Sea, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature, is only a short-lived, high-quality work, while The Flowing Feast is like a gentle elegy that returns to the light—Hemingway accidentally regained the handwriting of the Paris Hotel he had left behind in his youth and compiled a book, leaving behind one of his most important works. Dempsey laments at the end of the article that Hemingway, knowing that he has lost his creative ability, can only regain his genius in his memories.
In this regard, the academic community has always attributed the reason to Hemingway's increasingly serious mental illness, and the media has begun to take an interest in Hemingway, who retired to Cuba, and Hemingway's private life and rich cultural image have become the new focus of attention. The New Yorker interviewed Hemingway, who had returned to the United States briefly, and began with a long paragraph detailing his life with nine servants, 52 cats, 16 dogs, hundreds of pigeons and three cows in the Cuban countryside, creating an eccentric image of a literary genius.
These legendary and mysterious experiences undoubtedly influenced the publication of Hemingway after his death—Hemingway left a large number of literary fragments and was unable to collect fragments into books, but the publisher still hoped to profit from it, and used the gimmick of the event to publish the posthumous work quickly. In contrast, Hemingway's early literary works were gradually neglected. Hemingway, who has been wandering for many years, has difficulty giving feedback on the editorial results of the publisher, and often receives censored publication requests because of the violent scenes and sex scenes in his works.
Hemingway and supermodel Jean Patchett in Cuba, from a 1950 Vogue magazine report
As a result of the back-and-forth negotiations on content censorship, the text was reprocessed when it was republished a few years later, and works often differed slightly from publication to publication. Those posthumous works that have been carelessly treated, mature works that have not been comprehensively sorted out, are still not valued by the academic community. Although Hemingway is a literary giant with a clear image and far-reaching influence, his literature research is still a muddy water, and serious academic research is based on systematic collation and correction.
This is also the case of Robert E. Lee. The direction of W. Troden's efforts. In an interview with The Guardian this month, he mentioned hundreds of editing errors that may be dismissed as an anecdote by many readers.
In August of this year, he co-edited the fifth volume of Hemingway's Letters, which will be launched by Cambridge Press. It was also the culmination of a series of Hemingway publications.
Hemingway's letters were very different from his serious literary works, more like a farce, full of vulgar slang and dialects, but Troden found Hemingway's insistence on literary creation. In a 1932 letter to the then editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, Hemingway wrote of After the Storm: "Please be careful when you publish your work not to make any changes to the text or the title—not to add, not to delete." Without that premise, I wouldn't have delivered the manuscript. Don't let anyone contact me because it's too short. I know the text is short, and if I shrink it, it can be much shorter. In my work, it's a good enough and complete story that I wouldn't have given it to you or anyone else. I don't trade in length or word count because I'll delete a thousand words to add weight to a word. ”
Nearly eighty years ago, in the summer, Hemingway was overwhelmed with mental distress and ended his life. His later works may not have achieved the desired effect, but his early works fully demonstrated the refined style he pursued.
The research collation and appeal of scholars such as Troden is not only based on the factual needs of academic research, but also on the respect for Hemingway's literary pursuits. Perhaps soon, we will be able to wait for a new and late edition of Hemingway's portfolio, restoring his precise writing style with accurate corrections.
Reference Articles:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40284380?read-now=1&refreqid=excelsior%3A6e4f7c1f8f203115c3340d1547e26b9e&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
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