Jonathan Law writes about misprints in editions of poetry; he is either way too fond of such typos or is pretending to be for the purposes of pleasing his audience, but it’s a fun read. After reporting on Frank Key’s (frankly silly) suggestion that Sylvia Plath’s “a bag full of God” (from “Daddy”) is a misprint (“I am as sure as eggs is eggs that what Plath originally wrote was ‘a bag full of Goo’”), he continues:
Given Wilde’s dictum that ‘a poet can survive anything but a misprint’, you’d think that printers and publishers would take fierce pains to avoid even minor errata in poetry: but this just isn’t the case. If anything, radical, outrageous, sense-subverting typos are more common in verse than in the workaday medium of prose.
I suspect there might be two reasons for this. In the first place, many poems make their debut in tiny, no-budget magazines that can’t afford proof-readers and don’t send page proofs to the author; this is true even of new work by the Big Beasts of the poetry world. Errors introduced here are often perpetuated in later editions and can easily end up enshrined in the big posthumous Collected unless there is a thorough check of printed texts against MSS. Secondly, and much more interestingly, there’s something about the language of poetry that makes it strangely pervious to error.
In prose, any half-decent editor will query an incongruous word or a phrase that doesn’t seem to stack up in the ordinary way; some mistake surely. But in poetry, where odd collocations abound and everyday meanings get stretched and twisted like Blu-Tack? As long as a word passes spellcheck, then who’s to say that it’s (certainly) wrong? […]
In the best poems, words are charged with a weird static and every stanza carries its tiny shock of delight. But if the language of poetry depends crucially upon surprise, then the word that slips into a poem by sheer fluke – through accident or inattention – will sometimes look and act as if it has a perfect right of abode. At times there may be a true serendipity – the word that was never meant bringing a rich strangeness or glamour. There’s a well-known example in Auden’s ‘Journey to Iceland’, which originally began:
And the traveller hopes: ‘Let me be far from any
Physician’; and the poets have names for the sea;
The citiless, the corroding, the sorrow
And North means to all: ‘Reject!’However, when Auden received the galleys from Faber this had itself undergone a sea change: the second line now read
. . . and the ports have names for the sea
– a gift that the poet was happy to accept.
After discussing Wordsworth’s “choral fountains” (which became “coral fountains” in the 1832 Collected and all subsequent editions) and Yeats’s “solider Aristotle” (which was printed as “soldier Aristotle” for many years: “Having grown up with the ‘wrong’ version of this I can’t help preferring it”), he goes on:
Prestigious collected editions seem oddly prone to this sort of thing. In terms of its typos and other minor errors, the most notorious Collected of modern times has to be the bestselling edition of Larkin’s poems published by Anthony Thwaite in 1988 (but don’t let that put you off: there are several important reasons why this book is better than either of the subsequent big Larkins). According to James Fenton, writing in the New York Times, one 12-line poem, ‘Long Sight in Age’, contains no less than three significant errors […]
Sometimes, of course, a misprint will be more jarringly subversive of a writer’s intention. In the Collected Poems of Archibald McLeish, for example, the editors somehow contrived to misprint two of the best-known lines in his very famous ‘Ars Poetica’:
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.Is it just the over-familiarity of this piece – cited ad nauseam in every discussion of modernist poetics – that gives me a sneaking fondness for the botched version?
A poem should be worldless
As the flight of birds.That makes no sense at all, in context, and entirely subverts McLeish’s insistence on the concrete, this-worldly nature of poetry (‘A poem should be palpable and mute/ As a globed fruit’ and so on). But all the same, that ‘worldless flight’ is beguiling – a rush of the airiest Shelleyan romanticism where no one would look for it.
Call me a stick-in-the-mud, but I prefer the words a poet actually wrote (with the occasional exception, of course, of a case like Auden accepting the “ports” typo).
Unrelatedly, I require input on a Russian automotive term. I’m reading Aksyonov’s Остров Крым (The Island of Crimea), and at one point he writes “нужно было отжать сцепление, поставить кулису на нейтраль, включить первую скорость и левую мигалку.” I understand everything but кулису, which my dictionaries, and Wiktionary, define as ‘link.’ Google Translate renders the phrase “it was necessary to release the clutch, put the gearshift into neutral, engage first gear and the left flasher,” but I thought ‘gearshift’ was переключение передач. Any assistance will be gratefully &c. &c.