The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns
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Название: The Canongate Burns

Автор: Robert Burns

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Языкознание

Серия: Canongate Classics

isbn: 9781847674456

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_9d6511bb-7a1d-5d2c-a3ab-b9b2d8f634c9">80 ‘The Burns Cult’, in Hugh MacDiarmid: Selected Prose, ed. Riach (Manchester: Carcanet, 1992), p. 82.

       Editorial Policy and Practice

      As we have seen in our Introduction, nineteenth-century editors were seriously remiss, with varied degrees of ignorance and prejudice, in providing a proper context for the poems and the politically fractious culture out of which they emerged. One could simply not expect any knowledgeable enthusiasm for a revolutionary, democratic Burns given the victory of the British Old Regime during the ideological war of the 1790s, so complete was it that it virtually wiped the radical struggle from national memory. Towards the end of the century, the Henley–Henderson edition of 1896 brought Burns editorship to a nadir by combining Henley’s rampant right-wing jingoism with a deliberate policy of ‘correcting’ the poet’s spelling, punctuation and stresses according to modern standards. Burns’s distinctive habit of spelling place and proper names in capitals, italicising idioms and ironies and his use of long dashes are virtually all purged from their edition. This constant, careless editorial meddling seriously disrupts the intelligible rhythm of the poems by an accelerated ‘streamlining’ of the reading process so that the poet’s voice is significantly diminished.

      The three-volume Oxford edition of Burns: Songs and Poems (1968) by James Kinsley, is by far the most important edition of the poems. He lists a formal number of 605 poems and songs within the canon. However, several works are counted by him under a number with sub-categories, 100A, 100B, and so on. This means he accepts 621 poems, songs and fragments to the canon. This is increased further by the poems within Kinsley’s Dubia section – those works he could not properly date in terms of composition. Hence, the overall Kinsley total is around 630, with a few marked as ‘probably’ authentic.

      In his Warton lecture to the British Academy on 23 January 1974, Kinsley summarised what he had learned from his work on Burns. Thus he wrote:

      The implications of his bizarre conclusions are not those to induce confidence in his editorial vision or practices, coming from an editor whose perhaps over-laden commentary annotates the extraordinary degree of Burns’s allusiveness to other poetry. From the evidence of his poetry and letters he is about as unliterary as James Joyce. Indeed, from further remarks, it would seem Kinsley’s intention was to keep Burns’s poetry marginalised on the rural farm, isolated from his English contemporaries and de-politicised.

      Dr James Mackay’s 1993 edition, endorsed by the Burns Federation, parasitically plunders Kinsley’s volume III annotations (often presenting them as his own, without acknowledgement) and, to make СКАЧАТЬ