II
Emily Dickinson's capitalization proved to be no problem at all in
editing her poetry for a computer because IBM type is all upper case, and
her punctuation provided only minor difficulties. The special print wheels
that were purchased for The Cornell Concordances equipped the IBM
printing machine that would produce the final pages of a concordance with
all the punctuation marks in Johnson's edition.[14] Three minor changes in the
definitive text
were required in fitting Emily Dickinson's punctuation to the machine,
however. First, the brackets that Johnson occasionally used to indicate his
insertion of a letter or reconstruction of a word in a torn manuscript were
silently dropped because brackets were needed for other purposes in the
concordance. Secondly, the numbers that Emily Dickinson used twice in her
poetry had to be changed from figures to words because the punctuation in
her poetry had to be coded by numbers in order to prepare it for the
computer. Finally, the eight occasions on which Emily Dickinson used
single quotation marks—none of which followed double quotation
marks—had to be changed to the double quotation marks usually
used in
her poetry; this was necessary because the computer's processes of
alphabetizing treated single quotation marks as if they were apostrophes and
apostrophes as if they were letters. Thus the computer would have
alphabetized separately any word preceded by a single quotation
mark.
If Emily Dickinson's punctuation offered no interestingly difficult
problems, the variorum nature of The Poems of Emily
Dickinson did. Johnson's edition included not only variants inserted
in the manuscripts by the poet, but also variants to be found in differing
manuscript versions of the same poem, variants in transcriptions of the
poems
made by friends, relatives, and editors, and finally variants in the published
versions of her poems. The extent of these variants ranges from single
words or phrases through lines and stanzas to what can only be called
variant versions of complete poems. The inclusion of all of them is the most
valuable feature of Johnson's edition, and a concordance that was to utilize
them would have to be a variorum concordance. It is important to
remember that Emily Dickinson was a private poet, that her poetry was not
"finished" and the final choices between variants not made. To ignore the
variants and make a concordance only of the earliest versions of the poems
would seriously misrepresent the text of the poems that Johnson established
and severely limit the value of the concordance. Yet not all kinds of the
variants given in
The Poems of Emily Dickinson were worth
including in the concordance. Since the concordance is to the poet's words,
variants
only in spelling,
[15] punctuation, and word-order were
excluded; but when any of these types of variants accompanied a variant
wording, they were retained in the concordance. Variants in line and stanza
order were omitted because there was no way of representing them in the
single lines that are the units of a concordance. Also excluded were
published variants in poems for which there were manuscripts or reliable
transcripts. Johnson's inclusion of all published variants makes a fascinating
record of editorial corruption, but there was no point in perpetuating these
corruptions in a concordance.
[16]
Variants deriving from transcripts of poems which also exist in holograph
manuscripts yielded a thornier group of problems. The sources of these
transcripts and their varying degrees of reliability are matters too involved
to summarize here. Suffice it to say that variants in transcripts noted by
Johnson as probably deriving from manuscripts now
lost were included.
Determining what variants to include was of little help in the much
more difficult problem of deciding how they were to be included. In
The Poems of Emily Dickinson the variants are given either
in
the separate versions[17] listed after the
principally represented text or at the
end of the poems in which variants appear as alternative choices in
manuscript. The principal editorial problem was how to present these
separately noted variants in the individual lines of poetry. The simplest
solution would have been to treat all variants as if they were variant lines.
This could be done by filling out the variant word or phrase with the parts
of the line that were invariant and then marking the line with the letter "V",
next to the line number, as an indication of a variant line. This procedure,
while obviously the way to handle variants that were complete lines, had
serious disadvantages when used with parts of lines. To produce a variant
line when there was in fact only a variant word is a somewhat misleading
representation of the text that would increase the automatic word-frequency
counts to be made by the computer and included as an appendix to the
concordance. Given the number of Emily Dickinson's variants, the changes
in frequencies could be extensive. Such
a solution would also fail to show a very important aspect of the variant's
context: the word or words for which the variant was introduced. A single
method for handling all variants was abandoned, therefore, and the kinds
of variants were treated in different ways according to whether they were
single words, phrases, stanzas, or versions of an entire poem.
[18]
Variant words, then, were included in the concordance by enclosing
them in brackets and inserting them into the line of the principal text after
the word for which they were variant. When more than one variant was
given for a word, the alternative variants were separated from each other
within the brackets by a slash mark. Thus Emily Dickinson's description of
despair in the next to last line of poem #640 ("I cannot live with
You—"), together with the two variants written in the manuscript for
the
last word in the line, appears as follows in the concordance:
AND THAT WHITE SUSTENANCE—[EXERCISE /
PRIVILEGE]
Here as elsewhere in the concordance the word or words that the variants
replace can usually be determined simply by noting the number of syllables
in the variant and in the words preceding the bracketed insertion. By
including variant words in this manner it was possible for the concordance
to juxtapose different variants with the words for
which they were variants and—most important—to index the
variant as
well as the invariant words.
[19]
Editing variant phrases for inclusion within the line, alongside the
phrases for which they were variants, proved to be the most difficult
problem in preparing Emily Dickinson for the machine. Variant phrases
cannot be treated merely as variant words because frequently the phrases
cannot be matched, word for word, with the phrases in the main text. Even
if they could be always matched, breaking up the phrases would mean
ignoring the unity—and hence often the meaning—of the
phrases.
Sometimes it was impossible to do otherwise. But in many instances the
words of a variant phrase could be kept together. The variants, for
example, to the phrase "so eminent a sight" (poem #1265, line 4) in a
worksheet draft are "Another such a might", "So adequate", and "So
competent a sight". To treat these phrases merely as variant words would
obscure the relationships between the adjectives and nouns—and thus
partly defeat one of the principal purposes of a concordance which is to
provide the
contexts of the indexed words. By keeping the words of the phrases
together and by separating alternate variants with slash marks, it is possible
to indicate which adjectives go with which nouns. The line, then, as it was
edited for the concordance, appears as follows:
I FAMISH [PERISH] TO BEHOLD SO EMINENT A SIGHT
[ANOTHER SUCH A MIGHT / SO DELICATE A MIGHT / SO
ADEQUATE A MIGHT / SO COMPETENT A SIGHT]
[20]
In this line, as in most of the others where variant phrases were worked in,
it is again possible to see how far back in the line the phrase refers by
counting syllables. When the variant phrase differs in the number of
syllables from the phrase in the main text, the sense of the phrase
usually makes clear what it is a variant of. When on occasion even this
does not occur, the user of the concordance must have recourse to
Johnson's edition which, in any case, should never be very far away from
the concordance.
Sometimes the editing of variant phrases for insertion into the lines
of a principal text involved the deletion of words in the main text that were
repeated in the variant, or the repetition of words in the main text that were
omitted from the variant phrase, as in #1265. In poem #1448, for example,
the two variant phrases for "Intent upon it's[21] own career" are "Intent upon it's
mission
quaint" and "circuit quaint". In fitting these words into the line, the first
three words of the first variant phrase were not repeated in the variant after
appearing in the main text. In the concordance the line reads as follows:
INTENT UPON IT'S OWN CAREER [MISSION QUAINT /
CIRCUIT QUAINT]
And in poem #1343, line 2, Emily Dickinson wrote as variants for the
phrase "Was all that saved", first "alone sustained—" and then
simply
"upheld—". Johnson, to make the variant clearer, uses a bracketed
"Alone" with "upheld"; here as elsewhere this clarification of variants was
followed, and the line appears in the concordance as,
WAS ALL THAT SAVED [ALONE SUSTAINED— /
ALONE
UPHELD—] A BEE
It should be stressed, however, that this editing procedure does not involve
adding or removing words from Emily Dickinson's poetry, but simply
filling out elliptical phrases with words from the main text or removing
repetitions that were used to indicate the place of a variant phrase in a line.
Even with these procedures, it was not always possible to avoid all
repetition, as is seen in the example from poem #1343. Nor was it always
possible to keep the different words of a variant phrase together. Sometimes
the various combinations requiring insertion were too complex to be fitted
together as one or more variant phrases; in these cases the phrases were
treated as separate words or
combined into separate variant lines. The texts that involved this kind of
editing were almost always worksheet drafts whose definitive reconstruction
is impossible for an editor, let alone a concordance-maker.
[22] Sometimes the inclusion of a
variant
phrase would have meant the repeating of nearly an entire line in order to
keep the words of a variant phrase together. In these cases it seemed
advisable to separate the words rather than swell the bulk of the
concordance and the totals of the word-frequencies. When a variant phrase
was in effect a variant line—when, in other words, it lacked only a
word
or two of being a completely different line—it was treated as an
independent variant line and the missing words were supplied from the
original line for which the phrase was a variant.
In addition, then, to bracketed variant words and variant phrases, a
variorum concordance to Johnson's edition had to make use of variant lines.
A given variant was handled as a variant line when all, or nearly all, the
words in the line differed from the corresponding line in the principally
represented text—or when complicated variant phrases could not be
fitted
into the lines of the main text. Two different kinds of variant line were
used: numbered and unnumbered. Numbered variant lines consist of lines
clearly variant to a given line in the main text; the number of the variant
line is the same as that of the line for which it was variant, the only
difference in the identification of the two lines being a "V" alongside the
number of the variant line. Unnumbered variant lines—lines marked
with
a "V" but given no line number—were used for unplaced variant
lines to
a poem and for lines and stanzas of poems that were not included in the text
chosen for principal
representation by Johnson. In poem #1393 ("Lay this Laurel on the One"),
for instance, a draft of the poem has an opening four-line stanza that Emily
Dickinson omitted from the fair copy that was sent in a letter. In the
concordance each line of the omitted stanza is given as an unnumbered
variant line. The distinction, in short, between numbered and unnumbered
variant lines in the concordance is difference between alternative and
additional lines of a poem.
The Poems of Emily Dickinson includes not only
variant
words, phrases, lines, and stanzas, but also what amount to variant poems.
For
ten poems in Johnson's edition the main texts are given as double versions
of the same poem; since these constitute two poems under one number, it
was necessary to combine them in some way for the concordance.
[23] This was done either by listing
certain
words of one version as variants to the other—as in poems #494,
#1213,
and #1282 where the differences are quite minor—or through the use
of
numbered and unnumbered variant lines. How this was done can be seen
in the way the most famous double-version poem—#216 ("Safe in
their
Alabaster Chambers—")—was handled in the concordance.
The 1859
version of this poem was taken as the main text in the concordance, and the
lines of both the 1861 fair copy and its worksheet draft were treated as
variants to the 1859 version. The additional lines and stanzas of the 1861
manuscripts were clearly not variant to specific lines of 1859 manuscript,
hence they had to be listed as unnumbered additional variant
lines. And just as the arrangement in Johnson's edition does not imply any
evaluation of the quality or authority of the two versions, so in the
concordance the unnumbered variant lines are not any less significant or
valuable than the numbered ones.
Other editorial problems involved in making a variorum concordance
to Johnson's edition centered around the punctuation of variant words and
phrases. When the manuscript punctuation of single-word variants differs
from the main text, the difference is usually a dash following the variant.
These were not reproduced in the concordance because Emily Dickinson
seems to have used the mark mainly to separate alternative variants. The
punctuation of variant phrases was followed exactly in the concordance
because of the greater potential significance of punctuation in the meaning
of phrases. When the final punctuation of the phrase was identical with that
in the main text, it is given after the bracketed variant phrase or
phrases—thus indicating that the punctuation is the same for both
readings. When the terminal punctuation of variant phrases differed from
that in the main text, the variant punctuation follows the variant phrase
in the brackets, and the
final punctuation of the principal-text phrase precedes the bracketed
insertion of variants. Two types of variant "punctuation" had, nevertheless,
to be omitted from the concordance. Even with the special printwheels
made for the Cornell concordances, it was impractical if not impossible to
write a program and set up an IBM printer to print lines either under or
through words. Thus all cancels and italics in the manuscripts had to be
dropped. This is not a particularly serious sacrifice with the cancels because
they are so infrequent in Emily Dickinson's manuscripts. Less than one per
cent of the more than 100,000 words in her manuscripts are crossed out.
There are even fewer instances of underlined variants, yet these have
greater significance because Emily Dickinson appears to have indicated to
herself—at the time of composition or revision—the alternative
choices
she preferred by underlining them. Yet Johnson notes instances where later
fair copies of poems did not adopt the
underlined variants to be found in earlier semifinal or worksheet drafts of
a poem, and he concludes that "the mood of the moment played itspart."
[24] The inability of the computer
and its peripheral equipment to convey the results of these moods is one of
the small but unfortunate sacrifices involved in combining Emily Dickinson
and the machine.