From the source
Being an English major graduate I love finding any articles that discuss literature and debates that are going on in the literary world. Sure a simple book review can be interesting but for me there is little better than a new good piece of criticism on a well known text or a heated debate about the quality of interpretation of works. This article from the New York Times today is one of those debates I cannot help but enjoy reading about.
The whole problem deals with the transcription of some of Robert Frost’s notebooks in which there is claims of numerous errors by one side while the other side defends the transcription as accurate. It is a rather lovely example of what gets literature geeks excited. Having not read the transcription or ever seen the actual source notebooks I cannot claim to have much of an opinion on the accuracy or lack there of but I can say that with the use of primary documents being involved we are dealing with something quite fun.
Interpertation in literature is obviously a big challenge and leads to all forms of literary discussion and criticism. When we are given a primary source, such as an author’s notebook or journal, we are suddenly thrown a new loop in that we would like to assume that we are looking at something that is closer to the original source than say a novel or book of poetry that has gone through the whole editing and publishing process. It is interesting to be able to look at the actual hand written notes of an author or poet but I do not know if I agree that this is giving us all that much more insight into the individuals works or not. I know from personal writing experience that I write lots of notes and keep a number of varying drafts of works but I do not like to think that if someday I became successful and somebody found these notes and drafts that they would really be getting all that closer to understanding the actual piece of work. The reason I write drafts in the first place is to experiment and the reason I take notes is because I often have many ideas floating around and note taking helps me decide which ideas to work with and which not. I guess my point is that even when confronting a primary source we have to realize that interpretation must still occur to a degree because while we may like to think that a notebook is closer to an author’s actual thoughts the reality is that unless we are in his or her head we cannot ever actually know what the writer is thinking.
With all that being said though I think that when we are trying to present something as a transcription of a primary source we do need to scrutinize the details and make sure that we are transcribing accurately so as not to falsely display what somebody wrote. So if the accusers in the case of the Frost notebook transcriptions are really certain that the transcription has been done poorly then it is worth the argument and debate and I would say it is important that more individuals get involved in to the scrutinizing process to determine the facts of the matter.
A little note on Robert Frost and my college years: Robert Frost was a faculty member at Plymouth State University (where I got my Bachelor’s Degree) for one year in 1911. Big deal right? Plymouth sure thinks so. There is a Robert Frost House on campus and a bronzed statue of Frost sitting on a bench outside of Round’s Hall. I think that the most interesting fact about Frost’s teaching at Plymouth was that he did not actually teach poetry there but instead taught psychology. When the statue of Frost first appeared on campus (I think it was my junior year) it freaked a lot of people out because this is a life size statue that just sits serenely on a bench while writing a poem. The first time I saw the statue I remember thinking, “boy that old guy can sure sit really still” only to discover as I got closer that that was because the old guy was made out of metal.
~Nathaniel
Tags: literature, notebooks, primary sources, Robert Frost
You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.