4 feb 2011

Bibliography Rules

The book we know as Campos de Castilla by Machado was never published independently, as such, during Machado's lifetime. There was a first edition, that included about half of the "book." Then the poems were published in various collected poems of Machado under the Campos de Castilla rubric. Geoffrey Ribbans points out, however, that in the first such edition the actual title Campos de Castilla is absent.

Lorca never published a book called Romancero gitano in 1928. The actual title is Primer romancero gitano.

As Ben Friedlander notes in a recent facebook update, "bibiography rules." In other words, you can't just pull a book off the shelf and assume that the text is stable, identical to some previous edition. You can't assume that a poem you find on the internet has any textual integrity at all. Students will center each line of a poem in their papers. They will capitalize each line of a poem just because microsoft word tells them to, with no regard for the original.

A critical edition of Cernuda suppressed his capital letters, because that was the norm for that collection of critical editions.

These details are not trivial. They may be pedantic, but they are significant.

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