Following George Bornstein on “the politics of the page”, this article contends that, by examining the material decisions of writers, editors, and publishers on the design of recent bilingual editions of Irish-language poetry, one gains insight not only into Ireland’s shifting attitudes toward Irish Gaelic and its place in society, but also into the changing conceptions of “Irishness” itself. It distinguishes three stages in the evolution of bilingual publishing in Ireland: collaborative, adversarial, and deconstructive, with each stage represented by a slightly different “generation” of poets. Representative of the first wave is Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s 1990 collection, The Pharoah’s Daughter, the design of which suggests a collaborative venture, of Irish poet with Irish poet, who together realize a bilingual diptych of interdependent texts. Rather than a mutually beneficial enterprise, the second wave of Irish-language poets viewed translation as an extension of the linguistic imperialism that had marginalized Irish in the first place, and that may yet bring about its extinction. Second wave reactions ranged from outright rejection of translation into English, to a reversal of accepted layout practices by moving the Irish poem to the dominant recto position. The third wave of recent Irish-language poetry is “deconstructive” in that its practitioners have sought to undo the original/translation and Irish/English binary, either by mixing the two languages, producing bilingual versions in which neither version claims the status of “original”, or problematizing the cross-page correspondence of original and translation. All three developments have implications for how books are read, and how poetry in translation is best presented to its target audience.

The documentary record of interrelated, multimedia literary works is riddled with indefiniteness. The order of their materials is often uncertain, as is the medium that should serve as their point of reference. This article argues that such common and related indefiniteness, like ambiguity and genetic lineage, whether revealed through traditional scholarly methods or computational ones, can be modeled using graph technology. Graph technology, moreover, can be used to model much more about these literary works, from their atomic documentary features to their higher-order features. The article uses as its example Jaime de Angulo’s Old Time Stories, a Modernist American masterpiece consisting of voice, text, and image. Graph modeling, or graph editing, the work results in a fine-grained, computationally accessible representation of it as it really is in all its indefinite and networked nature. Such a representation lends itself to typical hermeneutic investigations enhanced by the power of inferential queries, and it can even serve as an actually authentic source for more quantitative investigations. Most important, like all non-digital natural-language based artifacts, it can also be endlessly modified by future editors without ever giving up from its structure the history of its own making.

While the Latin American book industry flourished in the mid-twentieth century, technological and economic challenges hindered the production of certain types of works. In this article I examine the Mexican firm Editorial Albatros’s failed attempt to publish Ripley’s Believe It or Not in Spanish during the 1940s. Drawing on archival material, I analyze the interplay of translation practices, printing technologies, and market dynamics that shaped Editorial Albatros’s failure. I ultimately highlight the broader implications of technological compatibility and material resources in global publishing, as well as the enduring appeal of Ripley’s work for Latin American audiences.

STS

Review.

Book Review.

Contributors

The period often considered the golden age of American type design (ca. 1900–ca 1940) saw the creation of a number of library collections specialized for the study of printing history. The most important of these were the John M. Wing Foundation at The Newberry Library of Chicago (founded in 1919) and the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts at Harvard’s Houghton Library (established in 1938). Both took inspiration from contemporary advances in bibliography and textual studies and both set out to exemplify printing history with specimens of type on the page for scholarly comparison; but they had differing emphases from the start, determined by the personalities and programs of their founders. The will of journalist John M. Wing (1845–1917) specified a collection that would allow study of “every significant development of the arts of printing and book production.” The first curator, Pierce Butler (1886–1953) began with incunabula and collected typeface by typeface through the centuries. Harvard’s Philip Hofer (1898–1984) was influenced by Butler’s classification scheme, but as an art historian, he began with aesthetic categories and emphasized design issues like illustration. As the two collections developed there were additional divergences, but also parallel interests, and both collaborations and rivalry. All the curators involved (Hofer in Cambridge and three successive librarians in Chicago) responded to ongoing developments in textual studies and in some cases anticipated them, both in their collection building and in their publications on printing history.

This essay offers some linguistic remarks on food-related words in Dante’s Comedy, with particular attention to variants in the manuscript tradition. This preliminary analysis is related to the research conducted within the Project PRIN AtLiTeG (Atlante della lingua e dei testi della cultura gastronomica italiana dall’età medievale all’Unità), which aims to provide the first Corpus, Vocabulary and Atlas of ancient and modern Italian food language.