Proposal

The texts I will focus on in my edition are Victor Hugo’s French poem “Booz Endormi” (“Boaz Asleep) and its translations by B. P. Alexander, R. S. Gwynn, Brooks Haxton, Steven Monte, and E. H. Blackmore. I will also include a passage from the Bible’s Book of Ruth which provided the inspiration for Hugo’s poem.  As textual variants, I think translations are an impressive feat since they have to stay true to the meaning of the original while making the text relevant to speakers of a different language and culture. Poems present an additional challenge for translators since they have to transfer the rhythm, sound, and syntax of a poem to a different language. Through my edition, I hope to explore the différance between the original text and its translation and demonstrate the mutability of translations.

The edition would be intended for an academic audience, primarily literary scholars interested in studying translations. My edition will be digital and allow the user to compare different translations to the original text and to each other to understand nuance in meaning. I plan on presenting my edition so users can compare differences in stanzas, lines, and even words between translations. The first section of my edition will allow users to read each text in chronological order, beginning with the Book of Ruth and ending with R. S. Gwynn’s 2009 translation, to see how the text evolved over time. The second section of the edition will offer a more comparative analysis of the text and its translations where users are able to toggle between different layers of translation. One possible way of doing this is having each line of a translation appear below a line of the original like so: 

The edition would have a third section that would promote quantitative analysis. This section would allow users to view which English words translations chose for their French counterparts, creating a glossary of sorts. 

To address textual variants, I will use Jack Stillinger’s editorial method of textual pluralism. Under this method, every version of a text is equally authoritative and reveals a different understanding of the text depending the time it was written. By including all the textual variants in my edition, my edition will demonstrate how translations change a text and why.