Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
(according to the notes in my "Penguin Classics" edition)
|
That is another (strong) reason to leave the apparent mistakes or inconsistencies in place. If you are reproducing not a particular arbitrary edition (even if it's the first), but a "scholarly" researched edition, with notes, etc. then it makes sense to just trust and respect the choices of the editor(s); if they thought a misspelling here and there was worth keeping (and they'd often say it in a footnote or preface), then you just do the same.
I come again to my case with Don Quixote, there are some words or names that seem to be misspelt or inconsistent, but if I go to the source text I usually find a note explaining how this spelling was preferred at the time, or how the different historical editions have dealt with inconsistencies. So at the end I preferred to leave almost everything unchanged. I only fixed the most obvious formatting or OCR-ish mistakes.
However, I'm also producing "Vie privée et publique des animaux" from pdf scans of a 19th century edition, and this is not such a "well thought" edition, it has some mistakes and even some upside-down e's, and I don't feel vile for correcting them. On the other hand, I'm keeping the old orthography of some words. But it's the same, one has to draw a line between the author's style and time, and the human mistakes of printers and editors (and even authors)...