Editorial
Notes
Some
Notes on the Current State of the Notes
• At
present the Z-site includes:
Ø
a comprehensive set of annotations to “A”, The Complete Short
Poetry
and the major prose works.
Ø
bibliographical information on LZ’s works, including a full chronology
of composition and publication dates, as well as criticism and reviews on LZ.
Ø
textual variants in “A” 1-8 and “A” errata.
Ø
information on “Objectivists” publications and LZ’s library.
• To begin
with, a primary task of this website has been to pull together the basic
information and annotations that has been done so far on LZ’s work, which have
been scattered and often difficult to access. Scholarly work on LZ’s work began
in 1969 with the publication of CZ’s A Bibliography of Louis Zukofsky and L.S. Dembo’s
interviews with LZ, Oppen, Reznikoff and Rakosi, which were conducted in
association with a conference on the Objectivists organized the previous year.
However, it would be yet another decade before substantial critical work began
to appear in mainstream academic venues, with the publication of the essays in Louis
Zukofsky: Man and Poet (1979), edited by Carroll F. Terrell, Barry Ahearn’s Zukofsky’s
“A”
(1983) and a more or less steady trickle of articles, particularly in Sagetrieb since 1982. With the
recent centennial of LZ’s birth, it seems a good time to consolidate what has
been done, which also will make apparent the unevenness of the critical
attention the larger body of LZ’s work has received so far.
• Scholars
using this site should be cautious and double-check quotations, references,
etc. Aside from the inevitable errors that creep into any project of this size,
the fact that I am based in Asia imposes limitations on my access to libraries,
and frequently I have had to rely on internet texts or second-hand sources for
quotations or references. In many cases it has not been possible to track down
or identify the precise editions used by LZ, although the latter question is
helped by the partial lists of LZ’s library. Please let me know if any errors
or inaccuracies are spotted.
• In his
reading and use of sources, LZ is possibly the most canonical American poet of
the 20th century—he loved reading classics. The immediate advantage of this is
that the majority of LZ’s sources are readily available on the web, which makes
this project much easier than might have originally been anticipated. It can be
presumed that unacknowledged quotations are from the internet, and therefore
can be readily searched and found.
• The
notes attempt to stick to reasonably objective annotation, background, source
identification and cross-references, while avoiding more speculative
interpretation, although recognizing there is no clear demarcation and that in
some cases speculation may be all we have. Also, keeping in mind that this is a
tool intended potentially for students as well as scholars, I have often risked
annotating what may be obvious to most readers. Throughout most of “A”, LZ incorporates a
considerable amount of contemporary, newsy references, much of which is quite
ephemeral, although how ephemeral will often depend on the reader’s own
personal history. Many of us can readily recall various images LZ evokes in the
1960s sections, but increasingly more cannot. There is unquestionably much more
such detail of this nature that could be added to these notes.
• Dates of
composition: From early on, LZ was in the habit of meticulously dating and
preserving his manuscripts (he never typed). The specific dates I have noted
for given works are usually from these manuscripts as documented in Booth and
Henderson, but they should be taken with some care because it is often not
clear precisely at what point in the composition process these dates refer.
Most often the dates appear to indicate the completion of the original version,
and sometimes but not always LZ will date significant revisions. The sources
for composition dates are CZ’s A Bibliography of Louis Zukofsky (1969), updated in
Terrell (1979), which gives a year by year chronology of composition, and Marcella
Booth’s A Catalogue of the Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection (1975), which including
specific dates written on manuscripts and is updated by Cathy Henderson’s
“Supplement to Marcella Booth’s ‘A Catalogue of the Louis Zukofsky Manuscript
Collection’” (1987).
• Quotations
from standard English works, e.g. Shakespeare and Milton, have been grabbed
somewhat unsystematically and consequently may be inconsistent in spelling and
sometimes textual readings. It would be desirable to systematically regularize these
according to the editions LZ used. LZ’s primary Shakespeare edition was the New
Cambridge edition of The Complete Poems and Plays, ed. W.A. Neilson and
C.J. Hill (Houghton Mifflin/Riverside, 1942). However, it is apparent and not
surprising that particularly in the case of Shakespeare, LZ used several
different editions—modernized editions in most cases but sometimes old spelling
versions (particularly for Pericles). As he indicates in some later sections of “A” and particularly in Bottom, LZ was very interested
in textual problems, especially in Shakespeare, and often preferred alternative
readings to those accepted by most modern scholars. LZ owned a copy of the
First Quartos of Shakespeare’s Poems and Pericles, for which he thanks
Mark Van Doren in Bottom (4); this is Shakespeares Sonnets, Lucrece, Passonate
Pilgrim, Pericles Being a Reproduction in Facsimile of the First Editions, edited by Sidney Lee
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), from which LZ quotes extensively as well as
responding to Lee’s introduction to Pericles in Bottom (293-294,
322-324,328-329). He also often uses first Quarto texts of the poems.
• Translations:
LZ relied heavily on translations, frequently adopting or adapting the wording
of specific renditions. I have tried to indicate whenever we know the specific
translations LZ used, which in most cases are easy enough to identify either
from internal evidence or from such sources as the partial lists of LZ’s
library books. Unfortunately, the internet is often not very scrupulous about
identifying precise sources and translators, so there are scattered cases of
unacknowledged translators. When offering translations of untranslated passages
in LZ’s works, I generally have preferred to use renditions that are as literal
as possible and follow the syntax closely, in some cases jury-rigging my own
versions.
• “A”-22
and “A”-23 pose special problems for the annotator—indeed, I am inclined to
agree with those who feel that the identification of sources in these sections
is of limited value in reading the poems. Nevertheless, there is also something
irresistible in attempting to uncover the sources behind texts that by and
large are almost entirely constructed from prior texts, however complex and
peculiar their transformations. To a large extent, the notes to these movements
incorporate the source identifications made by prior scholarship, plus various
additional sources I have been able to discover. But they are far from
complete, however that might be conceived, and the work of Leggott and Rieke on
these sections clearly implies there are limits to the adequacy of traditional
annotation in revealing what LZ is doing with his sources in these texts.
Perhaps what is ultimately required is the digital reproduction and
transcription of LZ’s working notebooks and reading marginalia (see Paul
Zukofsky on the latter).
• Although
there are a few exceptions, I have largely avoided hyperlinks outside of this
website in order to avoid the interminable problem of dead links. In most
cases, sources are extensively enough quoted that it is an easy matter to
search for the fuller texts, assuming they have not subsequently disappeared.
However, the bibliography of Sources Used by LZ does include links to available
internet sources.
• Dictionaries:
As is well-known, in his later life LZ acquired and was fond of using the Century
Dictionary and Cyclopedia in ten volumes, from which he used both etymological
information and sample quotations. Happily, this dictionary is freely available
on-line, and I have used it often for definitions and etymological information
in the notes for “A”-12 and following, since LZ mentions that he acquired the Century around 1950 (Prep+ 35). While the Century is a marvelous work, at
times its definitions can be quaint and quirky, so occasionally for the sake of
lucidity I have opted for a more standard dictionary definition. According to
Quartermain (“Writing and Authority” 160), in writing “Thanks to the
Dictionary” off and on during the 1930s, LZ used two different dictionaries: Funk
and Wagnalls Practical Standard Dictionary (1930) and Webster’s Collegiate
Dictionary (1917).
Last revised 21 March
2007
