Cirrus@Austlit

'D. H. Lawrence left England in May 1912; thereafter he would always, to some extent, be writing about foreign cultures and places without fully mastering any other language than English. Joseph Conrad made his name as one of the great masters of fictional prose in English, his third language. His contemporary, Henry Lawson, the finest Australian short-story writer of the 1 890s, was nearly deaf for most of his life yet found subtle ways of rendering the characteristic idioms and speech rhythms of a series of down-at-heel character - narrators from the Outback and from the city. Like Conrad, he staged story-telling situations where idiomatic language becomes the potent vehicle of truth-telling effects. In practice, none of them could keep full control over their texts, largely because they were writing into literary marketplaces where other considerations came into play. These considerations entered into their prose at the moments of writing and revision, not only later at the interfering hands of publishers, copy-editors and typesetters. The dilemmas occasioned for scholarly editors by such cultural translations can be eased or at least better understood if we plot them against the differences between Anglo-American and German editorial traditions. Those differences are reducible, I argue, to different inflections of the same fundamental work-related principles of agency and chronology. Emerging from this line of reflection is the idea of the editionas-argument: that the edition needs to take an attitude to the work that goes beyond the difficult textual cruces encountered by the editor - more generally put, that the edition needs to be seen as an embodied argument about the work.'

Source: Introduction.