by Constantia Munda
Introduction and Editing by Caroline Bivens
Caroline Bivens is an English MA student at the Univeristy of Central Arkansas
Ever since coming to college, I’ve never preferred doing a project over writing an essay. I’m not sure what it is, but I always feel I get the most out of writing an essay. However, this project was different. Not only have I learned a lot, but it is easily one of my favorite assignments in my whole college career. If I hadn’t decided to pursue academia, editing and publishing would have been my paths. This assignment allowed me to live that sort of alternative life while merging it with my academic pursuits. There is something cathartic about working to “modernize” a piece like The Worming of A Mad Dog—deleting extra “e”s, standardizing spelling, moving commas inside of quotation marks, and so on. While this was a tedious process, it was enjoyable.
What proved to be the most work and the most challenging, though, would be the translations and figuring out where the references came from. For instance, I really struggled to create a footnote explaining the reference of “Jupiter’s lightning which he darted at the centaurs” (pg 8 in my edition). I already knew some of the basic information from Roman and Greek mythology— like that Jupiter is the Roman god of sky and centaurs are half human, half horse—but I didn’t know what specific story she was referring to. So, EBSCOHost, Google Scholar, Google, OED, and several other resources became my best friends in all of my searches, but for this particular reference, I really struggled to find what/where/when it came from. I’d find one answer and then try to find another possible answer so that I could compare the two (if they were the same/similar, then bingo!), but with “Jupiter’s lightning which he darted at the centaurs” and a few others, I had a difficult time finding one precise answer or answers that were similar to one another. So, in these cases, I had to make an informed decision to go with the “best” answer or the one that seemed the most plausible. This also pertains to the translations. With Latin, Greek, Italian, and other languages I used online resources such as Google Translate and Perseus to produce rough translations. However, because I don’t know how to speak or read any of those languages, I had to do my best to create a translation that made sense in the context of the text. Another challenge I faced was selecting what sections of The Worming of a Mad Dog to keep and which ones to remove for this abridged version. Munda is such a fascinating writer, so I wanted to keep all of it. However, for the sake of time and my own sanity, I kept sections I find crucial to frame the text, like the first few paragraphs and the last few paragraphs. Then, I chose sections that stood out thematically, especially if they referenced anything pertaining to a dog or Cerberus.This assignment gave me so much more respect for editors. Of course, I knew it was a lot of work, but after experiencing it I can only imagine the amount of work that goes into a real edited piece. I think back to my Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick and how many footnotes there were, explaining whale anatomy or 19th century American and/or whaling culture. I also think back to Don Quixote and the numerous footnotes our translation had. Since reading these two books, or rather the editions of these two books, I always seek out a book that has prefatory material, footnotes, essays in the back, etc. The additional information is so enriching, even when I am not reading for school.