Diary of a Young Girl

I was wondering if the Definitive Edition of The Diary of a Young Girl should be separated out from the rest. The Definitive Edition is a complete translation of Anne Frank's diary whereas the earlier translations had sections edited out by her father.

I think the Definitives should be a distinct work, but was wondering what other people thought before going to the effort of combining/separating.

I think it should be separated because the text is different. I view it as different edition. I think this was a good idea.

It doesn't sound to me like something that should be combined. If one person has read the Definitive Edition, and another has read an earlier translation, have they read the same book? Have they both read Anne Frank's diary? I'd say yes.

edit: like jjwilson61 pointed out, I garbled this. I meant it doesn't sound to me like something that should be separated. Thanks :)

Amtep, what do you mean? You say they should not be combined but then you say they are the same book. It doesn't make sense.

You could look at the original as an abridgment if parts were left out and we usually separate abridgements. How much text are we talking about? What percentage would it be?

Your message got me thinking - because the Definitive Edition has 25-30% new material and was published with material her father, let's face it, felt was too embarassing to publish the first time. I consider that a different work.

So I supsected and checked it out on another set of journals I have - Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Which I consider to be different from the original Journals of Sylvia Plath. Mostly because her dirtbag cheating husband saw to it that her original journals didn't paint him in such a negative light (which is what one would do if they had the ability to hand over their dead spouses papers for publication, right?). The unabridged and the origninal are combined. I found some singletons for the original journals, but those were just haning out.

I'm starting to wonder just how many journals and dairies that have gone through this unabridgement/definitive editions are starting to get combined with earlier, highly abridged editions?

I'll probably start separating Sylvia out later tonight...honestly, that just doesn't sit right with me. Heck, the 384 pg vs. 768 pg count on those two might have been a slight hint they were "different." (I'm not such a fan of the Ted Hughes.)

edited for a little bit o' clarity...

If there is that much new material then, yeah, separate them.

Another vote for separating - it seems to be much the same as an "abridgment vs. full (or fuller) text" situation.

I'm for combining, but only marginally. What I'm really for is something that would say: This is essentially the same work but is a significantly different edition. Until that option is available, it's a judgement call.

>6 jjwilson61: It takes the book from 240-250 pgs to 350 pages. Basically a third larger and considered more adult - Anne is a teenager, complete with all that puberty brings teen girls.

This abridged and uncut vs. original definitely is continuting throughout the site - Stephen Kings The Stand was combined as well - you know the original vs. the uncut version with 300 additional pages. This is getting annoying. Heck, the intro in the uncut version is all about how he had to cut out entire plotlines and characters because the original publisher didn't think they could get the extra $$ for the book that they'd have to charge for the increased page count.

The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition has a lot of other stuff in it, if someone wants to work in it. I'll do a bit, but not all of it.

Too many things in here that are not obviously one version or the other. I give up.

I think it's one of those books where a very large part of the owners have in fact read a significantly shortened/edited/butchered version but don't realize or care to acknowledge that it's not "the real thing", and even if you managed to accurately separate them out there's probably no way they would stay apart.

There's a similar problem for at least some of Jules Verne's works.
The more widely circulated English translations often are the questionable ones and are merged with the main work while some more complete and accurate ones stand out alone, when it should be the reverse.

When translations are concerned, it is a very fine line. In a lot of cases, the translation omits enough material to make it a separate edition in the original language (including subplots in some cases...). But for the people reading the translated language only, this is THE book - in a lot of cases there is no indication of the omissions.

So should they stay separated? Probably. But where do we draw the line for the translations exactly? Omitted sentence? Omitted paragraph? 3 of each? Something else? And who can be the judge of it?

And if we separate the Definitive here, does it go together with the Russian and German copies (for example) or do they stay with the old translation?

#11: It's not the real thing in what sense? I'd say it certainly is the real thing in a cocktail party sense.

Translations like that are hard, but generally the line has been drawn broadly. You're not going to successfully exclude the "questionable" English translations here, so everything should just be combined in.

Hmm, I'm not sure this is a question of translation. I own, in German, both versions. One is "the book" (in my edition 315 pages); the other is the complete text along with commentary etc. (about 800 pages). ("The book" in German has never been the complete text; always the Otto Frank edition, I believe). So I definitely think that they should be separate! Probably the ones who can't be clearly identified should go with "the book". I might have a look in the future, but I don't have time for it at the moment! I do agree it's very frustrating ...

I definitely think that they should be separate! Probably the ones who can't be clearly identified should go with "the book". I might have a look in the future, but I don't have time for it at the moment! I do agree it's very frustrating ...

Ditto on all counts.

separate

#11>

There's a similar problem for at least some of Jules Verne's works.
The more widely circulated English translations often are the questionable ones and are merged with the main work while some more complete and accurate ones stand out alone, when it should be the reverse.

I can say a bit about the Jules Verne situation. Verne's stories were badly translated for the most part in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Sometimes there's a good translation from the 19th century but quite often these are not the ones which are commonly available and reprinted in droves from publishers today.

A classic example is Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea where most copies are the uncredited translation (a hatchet job really) by Lewis Page Mercier. In addition to many mistranslations and cuts that change the character of the novel, it even removes an entire chapter that describes the interior of the Nautilus. For some details on this, see this essay.

The rehabilitation of Verne began in the 1960s, particularly with the restored translation by Walter James Miller. In 1976 he produced the Annotated Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. However, these translations are protected by copyright so they are not often used in the cheap books in various "classics" series from publishers of books and ebooks. Fortunately, another Vernian, Frederic Paul Walter (writing as "F. P. Walter") has placed in the public domain a "good" translation of this book so that publishers of such cheap editions could have a good text from which to select.

How is a publisher to know which texts of Verne stories are (a) public domain and (b) good translations? For the latter, at least, they can look at the 2005 essay and bibliography by Arthur B. Evans. In the latter, the most common translations are identified by the opening paragraphs and the publishers which issued them. Evans evaluates these with marks to indicate if they are good, OK, or bad. Often the good translations, if they existed in the 19th century, are from obscure publishers that can be hard to find in electronic editions, ready for cheap reprinting. Nevertheless, it does provide the reader with a roadmap of what to look for when trying to get to the real Verne short of reading his works in French.

In the last couple decades there have been a number of modern academic translations of Verne's works and these are usually the preferred translations, ones that preserve Verne's content and syntax and do not introduce extra editorializing in the story as if Verne wrote it (like the Roth translations of the Moon novels reprinted by Dover famously do). Publishers such as Oxford University Press, University of Nebraska (Bison Books), Wesslyan, Bear Manor (the Palik series) handle these good modern translations.

Related to this are the situations where, late in Jules Verne's life, his son Michel began to edit and alter the texts created by his father. At the very end of his life and posthumously, the texts published as by "Jules Verne" are often more Michel Verne than Jules Verne. Some of the pure Jules Verne texts are being issued in recent years and some of these are being translated into English. The differences can be striking.

In LibraryThing, any translation of a given text is considered to be the same "work". However, they are not all the same for the reader/scholar/collector.

Many books and authors suffer from this. Swiss Family Robinson is another example with many different versions, some with abridgments and additions from the original. I would expect the works of Alexandre Dumas to have the same problem but I don't specialize in him. Clearly the various editions of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights would exhibit this as well considering the variety of completeness of the collections.

For the Anne Frank diary, it seems to me that the popularly published edition is one thing and the complete one another, a bit like the distinction between the release version of a film and the extended director's cut. It may be considerably greater in this sense. It may be closer to the differences in books called the Autobiography of Mark Twain, the most recent volume 1 being a much larger work than was issued around the time of his death.

James

>14 leselotte: "The book" in German has never been the complete text; always the Otto Frank edition, I believe

So they should be separated.

The German copies that were in the Definitive Edition are now here http://www.librarything.com/work/13635989 They do not show up on the Anne Frank combination page. Can someone combine them into http://www.librarything.com/work/3032251 please?

But now it seems that both my copies are combined (into "the book")? They're not the same work!

Ok, I have that separated out again. Can you write a suitable Disambiguation notice?
I was hoping I could do it after my library visit today, but not only is that edition not in the main branch, but everything that is in the main branch seems to be borrowed, including the English.