I agree that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for an English
collection to include stories that don't exist in French collections. Is
there some other source we can look at to get an idea of what's going
on? Maybe this needs some old-fashioned research in books - maybe
Maupassant biographies have some clues?
Re. titles, can't we just use whatever title the translator selected? If
story X was translated by some particular person, and we use their
translation, then we would just use their title.
On 7/19/22 2:20 PM, Vince wrote:
> All right. Here
> <
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Xso9v1FYk77TQgMh-NdYdO-r4WFfCwVHbDIngzNL-UM/edit?usp=sharing> is
> a link to a Google sheet with way too much information.
>
> The “canonical” source I started with was the
maupaussant.free.fr
> <
http://maupaussant.free.fr> French web site, which is a goldmine of
> information on Maupassant in general and his short stories in
> particular. At the time I started this, it was the only French source I
> had found that had all of the short stories listed.
>
> Since then, I found scans for /Ouevres Complete/, a French compilation
> of all his work (novels, plays, poems, etc.), not just the short
> stories. The short stories map to
maupassant.free.fr
> <
http://maupassant.free.fr> with the exception of a few short stories
> that the latter has that the former doesn’t. None of those have
> translations, either, so they’re out of scope for us, anyway.
>
> I have also found/listed five different English “complete” collections
> of his work, none of which are actually complete, and all of which
> contain stories that arenot in either of the French sources. More on
> that in a moment.
>
> I asked François last year to read a few stories from each of the three
> English collections I had at the time. Complete Writings and Complete
> Works are new since then, but Complete Works appears at first glance (of
> a couple of stories) to be the same translation used in Complete
> Original Stories, the one PG used for their transcription. Of the three
> different translations, COS/CWks, Complete Short Stories (CSS), and
> Works, he said Works was the preferred one. I need to see if Complete
> Writings is a different translation of one of those three, and depending
> on that, I’ll have him look at it as well. But, the translation is the
> least of our issues, so this doesn’t need addressing yet.
>
> The bigger issues are:
>
> 1. What stories to include, and
> 2. What English names to give them.
>
>
> For the first issue, as I said, I have two French “canonical” sources,
> where by “canonical” I mean that they’re French and they claim to be
> “complete,” so they’re not leaving out things that are untranslated,
> etc. It’s obviously entirely possible that they are missing a story or
> three, although, as I said, they agree almost across the board, with a
> few entries being on the web site that aren’t in /Ouevres Complete/.
>
> However, there are /seventy-five/ stories total that appear in one or
> more of the five English collections that are not in /either/ of the
> French sources. I’m willing to believe that a story or two might have
> slipped through, but I find it nigh on impossible that there are
> seventy-five Maupassant stories that neither of the French collections
> have. So I immediately suspect that some/all of those stories aren’t
> really Maupassant stories. Other than the French collections, however, I
> don’t know how we would verify them one way or the other. I’ve also
> found no indication that he wrote almost four hundred stories; almost
> every source I’ve found says around three hundred.
>
> Thus, the first question is: do we include those English stories that do
> not appear in either of our French sources?
>
> The second issue is what to call the stories that we include. There are
> four categories of stories:
>
> 1. Instances where the English story name is consistent across the
> English collections, and the English story name is a reasonable
> translation of the French name.
> 2. Instances where the English story name is consistent across the
> English collections, but the English story name has nothing to do
> with the French name (instead usually using something from the text
> of the story itself).
> 3. Instances where the English story names are not consistent across
> the English collections, and maybe one of the names is a reasonable
> translation of the French name.
> 4. Instances where the English story names are not consistent across
> the English collections, and none of the names have anything to do
> with the French name.
>
>
> Since none of the English collections have all the stories, we’re going
> to have a mix-and-match set regardless (i.e. stories from multiple
> English collections and probably multiple translations), and so “Use the
> name from X collection” doesn’t really work.
>
> Thus, the second question is: how do we want to decide what English name
> to use for the stories?
>
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