Charles Dickens published his travelogue American Notes, For General Circulation in 1842, after a somewhat unsatisfactory visit to the United States during that same year. His excitement at touring the young country, visiting its cities and glimpsing the untouched prairie (outside St. Louis, Missouri, which should give all of us pause) was quickly dampened by three particular outrages he faced upon exploring the country. One was southern slavery, which sickened him and which he denounced consistently throughout his travels and writings. The second outrage, nearly on the same level, was the proliferation of tobacco chewing and spitting. Dickens' disgust and horror at Yankee spitting reaches epic proportions in American Notes, making for some truly amusing reading. And a final outrage, and the one he took most personally, was the rather lax nature of American copyright laws, which were quite poorly enforced and led to a great number of low-quality bootlegs of Dickens' work being published throughout the United States. Dickens took this matter seriously, lamenting both his loss of ownership and the fact that such pirates were making money off of him. Time and again, Dickens called upon his hosts to subscribe to the notion of international copyright, but he was to be frustrated in this regard - such a law would not come to pass until the late nineteenth century.
Copyright can be a funny thing. I don't claim to understand all the nuances of the law, but I do know that once a book falls out of copyright, one can expect the market to be flooded with multiple releases of often poorly translated classics from countless publishing houses. It's the reason I've had at least three copies of The Brothers Karamazov on my shelf at one time or another, due to supposedly varying levels of translation quality (the 1990 Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation is the one to keep), and it's the reason searching for a copy of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe on Amazon will offer you literally hundreds of identical yet different objects. This kind of glut actually does a bit of a disservice to an author, or at least an author's legacy, because it takes a notable work of art and reduces it to cookie-cutter mass production. On the other hand, anybody familiar with how many great artistic legacies have been snarled for years in the morass of exclusive copyright protection or family / spouse meddling will agree that sometimes opening up a work to the market can have positive results.
Which brings me to Marcel Proust and Sonny Bono - bet you'd thought you'd never read that sentence. Proust's copyright protection expired over twenty years ago, in 1987, 65 years after his death, and with that expiration the French company Gallimard lost their long-held exclusive rights to publish his works (a legal battle shortly after his death led to a decision to award Gallimard this right for 64 years and 274 days). This expiration led to a flood of new editions, translations and commentary. When it comes to Proust's monumental 7-volume masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu, we English speakers have been stuck with C.K. Scott Moncrieff's quite old translation, originally composed between 1922 and 1930. I don't mean to slag off Moncrieff's version - indeed, his Remembrance of Things Past (Moncrieff's title, by the way, not Proust's, courtesy of Shakespeare) is a classic of its own and probably one of the main reasons for Proust's solid reputation and relative familiarity to this day. But there's a general rule of thumb about translations that holds a major work should be updated and/or re-translated every generation or so, if only to reflect changes in the language so that a work continue to seem fresh and natural, not trapped in the feel of the past (and by the past, I mean the past in which the book was translated - a little dense, I know). Moncrieff's translation, wonderful as it was, is now nearly 90 years old, and a work of such magnitude as À la recherche du temps perdu clearly deserved an update.
The UK publishing company Penguin set about rectifying this situation recently by hiring six different authors to offer new translations of the multiple-volume work. Apparently feeling that one Moncrieff equaled six others, Penguin grouped the seven novels into six (by combining The Prisoner and The Fugitive) and had a different translator tackle each one. The results, by all accounts, have been rather glorious, with Proust's epic coming alive once again in versions that are lively, fresh and respectful.
Except that if you walk into an American bookstore or peruse Amazon for the entire series of published volumes, you won't find them. Or, you'll only find the first four, published by Penguin / Viking. The final two volumes have been published and circulated in England, but they won't be allowed into this country until....2019, when our copyright on the remaining volumes expires. Whether or not Penguin /Viking will even be around at that time is a question I've asked myself several times. The reason for Proust's epic being split into two different copyright eras has to do with the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998, also known as the Sonny Bono Act (a sponsor of the bill) or the Mickey Mouse Protection Act (thanks to the enormous amount of lobbying put forward by Disney). The act changed American copyright law to better protect corporate interests, such as the ubiquitous Disney Mouse, by freezing the advancement date at which an item enters the public domain. Works made in 1923 or afterwards will not enter the public domain until 2019 - the terms have been expanded to the life of the author plus 70 years or a 95 / 120 years agreement for corporations.
Well, ok. What all this means is that Disney can continue to hawk pricey reproductions of Steamboat Willy and keep Michael Eisner armpit-deep in Dom Perignon for at least a few more decades, while I'll be forced to check out Amazon.co.uk to smuggle in a clandestine copy of Le Temps retrouvé if I finish the preceding volumes anytime between now and 2019. I remain amused that it took Mickey Mouse and Cher's husband to accomplish what the greatest Victorian novelist could not.
Copyright can be a funny thing. I don't claim to understand all the nuances of the law, but I do know that once a book falls out of copyright, one can expect the market to be flooded with multiple releases of often poorly translated classics from countless publishing houses. It's the reason I've had at least three copies of The Brothers Karamazov on my shelf at one time or another, due to supposedly varying levels of translation quality (the 1990 Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation is the one to keep), and it's the reason searching for a copy of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe on Amazon will offer you literally hundreds of identical yet different objects. This kind of glut actually does a bit of a disservice to an author, or at least an author's legacy, because it takes a notable work of art and reduces it to cookie-cutter mass production. On the other hand, anybody familiar with how many great artistic legacies have been snarled for years in the morass of exclusive copyright protection or family / spouse meddling will agree that sometimes opening up a work to the market can have positive results.
Which brings me to Marcel Proust and Sonny Bono - bet you'd thought you'd never read that sentence. Proust's copyright protection expired over twenty years ago, in 1987, 65 years after his death, and with that expiration the French company Gallimard lost their long-held exclusive rights to publish his works (a legal battle shortly after his death led to a decision to award Gallimard this right for 64 years and 274 days). This expiration led to a flood of new editions, translations and commentary. When it comes to Proust's monumental 7-volume masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu, we English speakers have been stuck with C.K. Scott Moncrieff's quite old translation, originally composed between 1922 and 1930. I don't mean to slag off Moncrieff's version - indeed, his Remembrance of Things Past (Moncrieff's title, by the way, not Proust's, courtesy of Shakespeare) is a classic of its own and probably one of the main reasons for Proust's solid reputation and relative familiarity to this day. But there's a general rule of thumb about translations that holds a major work should be updated and/or re-translated every generation or so, if only to reflect changes in the language so that a work continue to seem fresh and natural, not trapped in the feel of the past (and by the past, I mean the past in which the book was translated - a little dense, I know). Moncrieff's translation, wonderful as it was, is now nearly 90 years old, and a work of such magnitude as À la recherche du temps perdu clearly deserved an update.
The UK publishing company Penguin set about rectifying this situation recently by hiring six different authors to offer new translations of the multiple-volume work. Apparently feeling that one Moncrieff equaled six others, Penguin grouped the seven novels into six (by combining The Prisoner and The Fugitive) and had a different translator tackle each one. The results, by all accounts, have been rather glorious, with Proust's epic coming alive once again in versions that are lively, fresh and respectful.
Except that if you walk into an American bookstore or peruse Amazon for the entire series of published volumes, you won't find them. Or, you'll only find the first four, published by Penguin / Viking. The final two volumes have been published and circulated in England, but they won't be allowed into this country until....2019, when our copyright on the remaining volumes expires. Whether or not Penguin /Viking will even be around at that time is a question I've asked myself several times. The reason for Proust's epic being split into two different copyright eras has to do with the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998, also known as the Sonny Bono Act (a sponsor of the bill) or the Mickey Mouse Protection Act (thanks to the enormous amount of lobbying put forward by Disney). The act changed American copyright law to better protect corporate interests, such as the ubiquitous Disney Mouse, by freezing the advancement date at which an item enters the public domain. Works made in 1923 or afterwards will not enter the public domain until 2019 - the terms have been expanded to the life of the author plus 70 years or a 95 / 120 years agreement for corporations.
Well, ok. What all this means is that Disney can continue to hawk pricey reproductions of Steamboat Willy and keep Michael Eisner armpit-deep in Dom Perignon for at least a few more decades, while I'll be forced to check out Amazon.co.uk to smuggle in a clandestine copy of Le Temps retrouvé if I finish the preceding volumes anytime between now and 2019. I remain amused that it took Mickey Mouse and Cher's husband to accomplish what the greatest Victorian novelist could not.
Posts
2 comments:
The shipping from the UK will be huge. But you can get the final volumes from Amazon in the States. (I did, three years ago.) They now have copies of The Prisoner and The Fugitive from various sellers, and you can get Finding Time Again straight from Amazon. I was never happier to get two books than when these two arrived.
Thanks for the advice - always nice to avoid excessive shipping costs. With a little investigating, seems like any law can be subverted!
Post a Comment