One problem faced at a school with a budget tighter than a fish’s arsehole is the supply of texts.
Two choices then face a teacher of Lit: use the ones already in stock, or find them elsewhere.
As far as I’m concerned the former choice isn’t really a choice at all. To define your concept by the texts available is doing everything arse-backwards. It’s like making a movie by getting stars and then writing the script based on the acting abilities. And that doesn’t work. Ocean’s 11 proves that.
But the second way works much better. Literature involves stories written by “dead white males” as the critics of “the” canon almost invariably put it. But there is one huge advantage with that.
They’re all out of copyright.
All the texts I’ve chosen to study are available freely on the internet. www.gutenberg.org contains nearly all of the texts I wanted. I did this a couple of years ago when I had a sudden urge to jettison the texts out of a Year 12 course and decide to instead teach Heart of Darkness. (Heart of Darkness, by the way, was the only novel I actually read in two years of studying Literature when I was in high school.) I took the copy from Gutenberg, printed it off, wrote notes all over the copies, and photocopied 60 copies. All up, I think it cost the school $25. Plus the students now had copies of their own which they could write all over.
Unfortunately I’ve discovered other problems. Gutenberg doesn’t have Medea which struck me as odd. So I had to google blindly. (Side note: I just noticed Word doesn’t recognise lower-cased “google” as a verb. It has the red squiggly line of stupid under it.) The first copy that I read was in prose.
The second copy that I read was translated as poetry. I’d printed off my copy and was about to copy it for the class when my librarian-teacher (or teacher-librarian. I should get that right. Not only is she my friend, and awesome at her job(s), she has that stereotypical nasty school librarian streak to her. So hot. So very hot.) pointed out another copy that was annotated. It was shorter (86 pages vs 39), thus fewer pages, thus cheaper, thus happier school. (Remind me to tell you about our school’s attempt to guilt us into making fewer photocopies.)
But there was another very interesting difference between the three texts. The first – the prose - copy I was going to use had what I call the “Thor effect.” Obviously the translator was going for a more “noble” feel to it. After all, this was ancient Greek Literature and so therefore should be ‘above’ normal writing. Thus “thee”, “thy”, and “wouldst thou” proliferated. It was essentially written in early modern English, though the translation was done in the early 20th Century.
It seemed contradictory for two reasons: why change it from poetry to prose, but still elevate the language; and why if Euripides was renowned for using mundane, ordinary language for extraordinary purposes, would a translator ignore this, and once again, elevate it beyond an average reader’s understanding?
And here I am confronted with the problem of using Medea, Beowulf and to a lesser extent, The Canterbury Tales: which translations do I use?
It’s obvious now that I can’t concentrate – honestly – on the language used, since it’s not the original language. But I can’t ignore it. And surely the translations will differ considerably.
Any thoughts?
