[lit-ideas] Re: Milton translated (as prose?)
- From: "Julie Krueger" <juliereneb@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2008 23:45:28 -0600
A friend of mine to whom I also sent the article replied with this:
<<I can't pinpoint the market for this book. Specialist scholars will
disdain it. Graduate students will snub it. Undergraduate courses cover too
much ground to allow focus on a single poem, and the undergrads will use
Cliff Notes, etc., instead (or, in this comic-book-movie age, the Classics
Illustrated version).
I suppose the publishers are aiming for institutional sales and sales to
poetry and lit lovers. I would estimate that no more than 5 to 10 thousand
copies have been printed.>>
I guess I, too, have trouble trying to identify the primary marketing target
group for this.
Julie Krueger
On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 11:36 PM, John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 2:26 PM, Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Paraphrasing Marcus Aurelius, Shakespeare has Hamlet say: "For there is
>> nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
>>
>
> Is pandering the issue here? Or a service to readers like the provided by
> the famous Loeb editions of the classics in which an English translation is
> on facing pages across from the original Greek or Latin? Or, perhaps a
> better example, like my edition of the Four Classics, which includes
> extensive footnotes and a modern Chinese translation as well as the original
> classical Chinese?
> Why, I wonder, have we leapt to the conclusion that the work in question is
> intended for classrooms? Might it not be a scholar's gift to fellow
> bibliophiles, who will welcome the opportunity to compare his, apparently
> deeply expert, take with their own?
>
> John
>
> --
> John McCreery
> The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
> Tel. +81-45-314-9324
> jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> http://www.wordworks.jp/
>
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