Old English

And thus the bookstore anecdotes continue to accumulate.

At first when I heard the customer asking for The Prince by “Mack–?” I was happy to be able to show him the copies we had (a Borders version and a Signet classics version). He asked, of course, about the difference between the two, and I told him that aside from the price and size of the books, they should be mostly the same. The difference came when you factored in the work of the translators, who might have different skills or purposes for the undertaking. [Out of personal interest, I checked the translators’ names, thinking that if one had been done by William Weaver, the translator of The Name of the Rose and If on a winter’s night a traveler, I would recommend that one. But Weaver only does contemporary fiction, I think.]

However, in response to this abundance of information about translation, the customer said, “Yeah, so we can understand the Old English, right?”

I hesitated, I really did. “Actually, Machiavelli wrote in Italian.” You ethnocentric ignoramus. Do you really think that Machiavelli sounds like an American name?

This is like the person who came into the store asking for “Hamlet in English.” Hamlet happened to be written in modern English, thank you, but I showed the customer a copy of Hamlet with a ‘translated’ facing page in contemporary prose and kept my mouth shut.

This is like the person who wanted Julius Caesar. Marvelous! I think to myself. A person who loves both history and literature. But when she opened up the book, she pointed to the notes at the bottom. “My English teacher said we should get one with these…” She searched for the word.

“Footnotes?” I offered. “Glosses?”

“A built-in dictionary.”

I despair.