I see that this is the 399th
in a series of weekly blog essays that began on June 13, 2009. Time sure flies when you’re having fun. Only rarely do I look back at this now
sizable archive, and then mainly to fix in my mind the approximate date of this
or that event or experience of the past eight years. That is the motive that led me to review the
title of my very first blog post: “Of Columns, Communists, and Camões”. The “columns” part of this catchy title was
pretty obvious, since my claim about the blog was that it would be the
continuation of an earlier newspaper column.
As for the Communists, I was just then publishing a book entitled The Anti-Communist Manifestos. Finally—and this is the punch-line of this
shaggy-dog paragraph—I was seriously projecting a book devoted to the
Portuguese poet Luís de Camões.
I do not
know how fine my mill wheels grind, but I can certainly boast that they grind
exceeding slowly. This past week has
been spent with the proof sheets of Luís
de Camões: The Poet As Scriptural Exegete.
I would appear to have prosecuted this project at a rate of about a word
an hour for the last eight years. If the
center holds and the creeks don’t rise, an eager world can expect this
important contribution to Camonian Studies in June or July, just in time to
take to the beach. I have not done any
proofreading in rather a long time.
Readers of the blog will already sense that I am not particularly good
at it. Only the fact that Joan has given
the once-over to most of the essays keeps the mechanical quality at any
acceptable level. Readers not
infrequently draw my attention to more or less egregious flaws found on unjoaned
pages. The kinder ones do it through my
private email address.
As a matter
of fact—and this is not special pleading—it is much easier to proofread
something written by somebody else than something of one’s own. We tend to see not what is actually on the
proof sheet but what we want to see there or what we think we remember
writing. Although the early printers
boasted that their new technology allowed authorial
correction in proof, in actual fact their professional proofreaders were
usually underemployed arts graduates who failed to get tenure in a reputable
academic institution. They were called
“correctors to the press,” and they were generally erudite Latinists with a
tolerance for execrable handwriting rather than “independent scholars.”
The learned
body of correctors to the press had their own informal guild, and they worked
zealously if not always successfully to keep howlers out of publications
destined for the erudite. Some developed
theories of proofreading. The earliest
handbook known to me on this subject (Leipzig: apud Michaelem Lanzenbergum, 1608), the work of a corrector named
Jerome Hornschuch, is entitled, in Greek, Orthotypographias.
If you know what an orthodontist or an orthopedist does, figuring out
what an orthotypographer does is a piece of cake; and, fortunately, once you
get beyond the title the rest of the book is in Latin.
“The
proofreader [writes Hornschuch] should scrupulously avoid giving himself over
to choler, to love, to sadness, or indeed yielding to any of the lively
emotions….Especially should he shun drunkenness, for is there an individual
with vision more deranged, or of greater degree of stupidity, than the idiotic
corrector who transforms Ranam into Dianam and Dianam into Ranam?”* (A rana
is a frog, whereas Diana is the
goddess of the hunt, so that such a metamorphosis would be out of bounds even
for Ovid.) I pretty much meet the
standard. The lively emotions exist for
me largely in memory, and I coddle my liver.
But I still cannot proofread my way out of a wet paper bag.
I
take comfort from the fact that some of the world’s greatest scholars have been
notorious for their orthotypographical ineptitude. My own great master D. W. Robertson, Jr., in
his engaging little book on Medieval
London, mentions a certain church where the devout John of Gaunt sometimes
went to play. That is, however, child’s
pray compared with the howler from which a keen-eyed referee of my current
manuscript rescued me. In a passage in
which I was attempting to praise the late Vasco Graça Moura, a versatile
Portuguese man of letters and traditionalist defender of the peninsular Lusitanian
tongue, I wrote that he “was himself very much a Renaissance man: lawyer,
politician, poet, pubic intellectual…”
Oh,
well. I once read a book about the
literary scene in Edwardian London. One
of the most prominent English men of letters of that period was Edmund Gosse,
perhaps best known today for his remarkable autobiography Father and Son. This author
featured prominently in the book to which I refer, which was something of a
festival of typographical errors. The
library copy I read had pasted into it a list of “Corrigenda”—that is, “things
to be corrected,” errors caught only after the book was printed. It began with the most poignant corrigendum I am ever likely to read:
“For Goose, read Gosse throughout.”
*translation from the delightful pamphlet The Corrector of the Press in the Early Days
of Printing (1922), by the great American bibliographer Douglas McMurtrie.
