Pretension in context

[muckefuck]

The last day of Celtic Fest, monshu and I ducked into Barnes & Noble for a little refreshment before taking the train back home. They had a half-price sale on their eponymous editions of literary classics, so I picked up the omnibus volume containing A potrait of the artist as a young man and Dubliners. I have a copy of the former somewhere, but it's in poor condition; I'd only ever read the last story ("The Dead") in the latter.

In general, they did a bang-up job. As someone who's been known to pull out a street map when reading a novel or short story set in a European city, I love love love the fact that each story in Dubliners is furnished with a street map showing the routes of the characters therein. There's a handy chart explaining British pre-decimal currency to those of us who never had to use it and the critical apparatus looks pretty solid, too.

But I wonder about the footnotes. A lot of the choices of glosses seem...odd. I fully understand the need to decode Catholic lingo like chalice, Eucharist, and Sacred Heart or regionalisms like tea for the evening meal and curate for a "spirit-grocer's assistant" (as the OED puts it), but does anyone really need to be told that "Persia" is the older name for Iran or that punch is alcoholic (at least when consumed by a drunkard in a tavern?)

I guess the most curious thing for me was that, more often than not, the meaning of most terms was clear from context. An especially egregious example:

He was now safe in the dark snug of O'Neill's shop*, and, filling up the little window that looked into the bar with his inflamed face, the colour of dark wine or dark meat, he called out: "Here, Pat, give us a g.p.† like a good fellow." The curate‡ brought him a glass of plain porter.
...
*O'Neill's shop is a pub[.]
†Glass of porter, a dark ale.
‡ Dublin lingo for a bartender

I mean, really, if you can't tell from that passage that "g.p." must be some kind of slang for "glass of porter", then what do you think you're going to get out of reading Joyce? And the identification of a shop where a man has gone expressly for the purpose of a purchasing a drink as "a pub" or "a bar" is sadly typical.

I can't help but wonder: Are that a lot of people out there, when they hit an unfamiliar word in the middle of a sentence, come to a halt and can't proceed until they know what it means? After a couple of stories, I found I had to fight the urge to read the footnotes unless I absolutely had no choice since otherwise the obviousness of most glosses only irritated me.

BTW, I'm not sure who to blame for the mistakes in the Irish, like *deoc for deoch (in deoch on doruis "one for the road") or the lack of accents in *Eire Abu (i.e Éire Abú "Up With Ireland!"). Joyce, one of his editors, or perhaps even the characters themselves. After all, *deoc with a [k] rather than a [x] is a perfectly reasonable mistake for a non-native speaker to make, as the man who uses this expression is.

Comments

[danbearnyc.livejournal.com]

Apparently you haven't tried teaching this text to college freshmen.

[cpratt.livejournal.com]

To be honest some of us desperately need the glosses. I wasted enough time in university struggling with Chaucer and Shakespeare taught by instructors who wanted us to feel the poetry when I couldn't understand a damned word of the text. Joyce is easier, sure, but I for one probably never could have guessed that he meant "glass of porter." Honest.

[stephe.livejournal.com]

I find it interesting that, in the passage you cite, "snug" isn't glossed.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Actually, it is; I left it out of the quoted footnote for simplicity's sake (thus the [.]).

[fainic-thu-fein.livejournal.com]

The original manuscript might have included a ponc séimhithe over the c in "deoc" that the printers weren't able to reproduce or maybe probably just casually ignored. That would explain the lack of fadas, too.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

The only problem with that explanation is that in the last story, "The Dead", beannacht libh is spelled exactly so.

[wwidsith.livejournal.com]

Huh, I agree with you – if I see a footnote, I assume there's some fascinating inter-textual detail about to be revealed, and when I find it's just a fairly obvious gloss it can be quite irritating. That's what a good dictionary's for! American editions are particularly bad for over-glossing in my experience.

[mawombat.livejournal.com]

Us innocents would assume that "punch" is a non-alcoholic beverage consumed at grade school dances, and that the poor drunkard probably got gypped.

[zuzentzailea.livejournal.com]

The Penguin Rasselas is one of only three books I can recall deliberately mutilating from beginning to end. On about the first page, 'massy' (of a mountain range) was glossed with an endnote. After a while I had to get out the correction fluid and remove all the numbers, and I pulled out the pages at the back.