The online journal Scud describes itself as ‘lo-fi purveyor of free art’ (and that’s all the info on offer, apart from the content, but what it does, it does well IMHO). They’ve just published two of my prose poems: I carry this noose’, and ‘I went to the sage’.
I’ve been reading some of Aidan Higgins’s tales and autobiographical pieces, Helsingør Station & Other Departures (1989) — a writer who I first read about forty years ago (Balcony of Europe) (what happened to my copy, I wonder? Lent or disintegrated). He was recommended to the publisher John Calder, as I recall, by none other than Samuel Beckett (‘He has talent, I think’); and famously received a letter from Beckett advising ‘Despair young, and don’t look back’ (reproduced in Alannah Hopkin’s memoir, A very strange man (2021).
So here, in a London-based memoir called ‘The bird I fancied’, the author and companion go to London Zoo, and he describes: ‘In the apiary the caged ones stretched out their long arms and took flying leaps at the trapeze’. These are some bees, I’m thinking. The error is compounded several times (p181-182). So surprised I was that I went back to a historical dictionary to see if the word might previously have referred to apes not bees. Elsewhere in the same account, Higgins readily and casually reveals ignorance about cricket and the Lords cricket ground. Why would he write in such a sloppy manner? His publisher was Secker & Warburg, a London firm: did no-one there bother to read what he’d written and quietly suggest amendments?
To me it seems common sense, not eccentricity, if I’m not sure of a word, to check it in at least one dictionary. And even when I am confident of a word, I’ll often check it in an etymological dictionary in order to understand or explore possible resonances.
What the above examples suggest — and this one, and those mentioned here, and here — is that it would be foolish to expect an editor to spot errors, glaring or subtle. What do they do, I wonder?
As I’ve been commenting on the role of editors and, to a lesser extent, translators, I was reminded of an anecdote I read many years ago, concerning the translation of one of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels by his son Dmitri. Describing a railway train, the original text, as I recall, referred to ‘a row of dark dog nipples’ on the roofs of the carriages. Dmitri, rather naively, initially offered the translation ‘ventilators’. This was knocked back by the famous father: ‘there are no ventilators on my train’.