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Old 06-11-2015, 12:29 AM   #7
ATDrake
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Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexBell View Post
That's more or less what I thought it meant from the context. But my main concern is whether to leave it as is, with the wording very strange even to English readers, or whether to change the wording so it makes sense to readers in the 21st century.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexBell View Post
It's not so much making the book 'accessible,' though I think that's a worthy aim. It's more that I'm reluctant to pretend Dickens and Collins are saying something that they clearly didn't intend.

Whether the 'feed and water' meaning can be found in the right dictionary or not, what comes across on first reading for us is different from what they meant.
Perhaps you might consider leaving the word as-is, but adding a footnote which gives a modern gloss for the presumably archaic usage?

French translations of stuff do this a lot, and I have a bunch of Nordic noir novels which have sporadic "NdT: blah blah blah" scattered throughout, which indicates a note from the translator which tells me that X name mentioned casually in passing in the text is a famous Finnish philanthropist whom I ordinarily wouldn't know about who is otherwise not relevant to the story beyond being a cultural reference by the 1st-person-narrator, or that the brief untranslated foreign phrase in dialogue Y is actually Russian for "get lost, you idiot!" when our non-Russophone heroine is speaking English to the hostile locals during her trip to Moscow, and so forth.

Actually, IIRC, some of the Barnes & Noble Classics editions do this for archaic word usage, with brief explanatory footnotes for other stuff as well, like the different kinds of carriages in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and if it's the sort of thing you might be interested in doing, it could be a nifty value-add to your PD titles that would help differentiate them in case some people start pirating your versions again.
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