Do you ever read the critical introductions that they put in reprint editions of classic lit?

Often I prefer them to the actual text.

If it's something like Anna Karenina or Pride and Prejudice, usually no, or at least not until after. But for a lesser known work, especially one I don't know much about, I might look at the introduction.

It's not a hard and fast rule for me, but I tend to read them after I finish the book. I like to form my own conclusions!

After the book, not before, because they do contain spoilers.

This is a bugbear of mine. Particularly those dismissing plot as a superficial element of the text. Anna K is a prime example. 1,000 page book. 4 page introduction. Gives the whole plot away.

I felt the need to hunt down the woman who wrote the intro and push her in front of a train.

Or put her on a train to Siberia

I try to read them because I like to pretend I'm at university but they're invariably the biggest load of old pontificating....

Afterwards, if I remember.

Would they serve the reader better as afterwords?
Yes.

Rarely read them, but if I do, it's always after I've finished the book

i never read these things, they fucking piss me off. i've had too many books spoiled by them. why in god's name don't they put them at the end??

mikeyg/anyone do you know if that new translation of anna k. is considered essential? i was wondering because i just ordered it and i had to kind of hunt for the old one! (my logic being if it satisfied for a century it can satisfy still)

, they fucking piss me off. i've had too many books spoiled by them. why in god's name don't they put them at the end??

ARRRRGH! Exactly! You see them at the beginning and you're so tempted to "enrich your understanding of the text whilst you read" and then, instead of satisfying historical context, they contain SPOILER AFTER SPOILER! In an ideal world classics would be preceded by an historical-context primer and FOLLOWED by somebody's brilliant essay. Cripes! How do you get to be a renowned literature professor without realizing that books get to be classics b/c they are FUN TO READ???? We yell at critics who spoil the surprise, don't we? Why do people assume that when a book is more than 50 years old it's suddenly this pure intellectual exercise? Why is it "timeless" if it's boring now -- and if it isn't timeless why the hell are we being told about it by a prof of lit and not of history!???!?!? AUUUUUUUUUUGHGHGHHGH!

I'm a sucker for any kind of paratext, and to be honest I often find them helpful. Sontag's introduction to the edition of Ferdydurke I have was helpful. I do love translator's notes as well, it's nice to see them get their moment in the spotlight.

I'm with Matt.........to read them 1st is a must. I usually find them interesting and informative.

I think the only one I've gotten anything out of in the past year or so was the one to "Gawain and the Green Knight" and I didn't mind that because I'd read all these adaptations anyway so I knew the plot. In general, I find it a LOT more fun to just fall into the book and go "Whoa, what happened?" even if that harms my scholarly comprehension.

I usually skim when they start talking about plot specifics, but then again I guess I'm not usually reading novels or anything where the plot is important. An intro to Paradise Lost can spoil anything it wants.

The intro to "Pale Fire" just made me decide not to read the book after all. She went into alot of detail and made the book sound dull as fuck. i might go back to it.

Well, to be fair, it is a little dull. Eventually it gets interesting. You have to trust Nabokov, that it'll pay off eventually. I mean, it's a novel in the form of an extended exigesis of a poem!

yeah, colin is absolutely spot on. the introduction to the silver-sheathed penguin classic edn. of that book has ruined me for all of nabokov actually; she made 'pale fire' sound like writers' worst excesses amplified and made a silly game of. euch.

it's true. I can't pick up any nabokov now without thinking back to that introduction. I have little to no interest in him.

She's done what trying to read Ada will do anyways.

philosophy, science, etc.: yes; fiction: no

Oh yeah, translators' notes: I loves em.

cozen we have so much in common :)

Translators notes are totally hot. Has anyone put out an anthology of translator's notes?

N.B. I also really enjoy reading Author's Acknowledgments.

Casuistry, if you like yer paratexts (and I think you do) then you really, really ought to read this.

There's a bit more info at the U.S. Amazon site, where the things are being sold for .74 the remaindered copy (I grabbed one)...

Oh, good call. I'll grab it as well.

That "Footnote" book that it recommends on that page -- I have it out from the library. The writing is a bit dry, but it's what made me want to pick up Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I then stopped reading the Footnote book. But even though I didn't like the writing, the information was interesting -- I should at least skim the rest of it.

Don't see how putting the intro at the end of the bk would help...I'd be curious and still read it first if I wz bothered about it.

grr if you read it before it's cheating! (if nothing else) and when you cheat YOU ONLY CHEAT YOURSELF

Tony Tanner's intro to The Great Gatsby (c. 1990) seems to me a masterpiece of the genre.

... as is a.l. kennedy's introduction to jean rhys' 'good morning, midnight'.

For me the ne plus ultra of the genre is Michel Tardieu's intro to My Strange Quest for Mensonge by Malcolm Bradbury.

that 'invisible forms' book seems a bit light to me. i wish i had one just like it only 500 pages long from oxford university press by the world's expert on paratexts.

i read almost every introduction and preface and other front matter to every book i buy, often long before ever getting back to the rest of the book. it's very informative about some things that are a pain to find out in some other way. i can't think of a book i ever thought was ruined by one. (though they are certainly not all good; but the bad ones do not ruin the books they introduce.) like, say, anna karenina. i already knew about the train. who doesn't know about the train? well, certainly i am one who tends to know about the train, and things like the train, only in other books that are not anna karenina.

the pinefox's comment interests me since i have an old hardcover double edition of the great gatsby that puts it together with tender is the night, and as such it had not crossed my mind that people would continue to write new prefaces and critical introductions for books that i already own copies of. however. thomas pynchon wrote a new introduction for the recent edition of 1984, which seems to me like a good enough reason to own a copy of 1984 again, even if i have already read the introduction in a bookstore. it was a good introduction!

for philosophy in particular, prefaces and introductions tend to be places where the authors make ex cathedra comments or reveal methodological principles or make sweeping programmatic statements to an extent that they will not allow themselves within the text proper. so, illuminating for anyone interest in methodology and philosophers' disinclination to talk about it.

there should be more translators' notes. what little we are given in the way of them is criminal sometimes.

introductions that are not so good:

joan stambaugh's introduction to her translation of 'being and time'
ones by william gass, i find

introductions that are appreciated:

the translators' introduction to gadamer's 'truth and method'
the intro to the current penguin edition of the wake (the one with the book of kells picture on the cover)
royall tyler's introduction to his genji translation

introductions that are more or less integral to the work now:

berryman's note about the dream songs
wittgenstein's introduction to the investigations

i recall liking the pevear-volokhonsky introduction to their karenina translation.

pierre joris' introductions to his celan translations, not so much. ok, though, considering the task he confronted, i suppose.

i wonder whether there's not a whole translator code that tends to dictate when they start talking about their translations in this way. for instance, it seems to me they're more inclined to when offering a new translation of a previously translated work, either to justify the new work or to sell it. extremely 'difficult' works tend to receive translators' notes or prefaces. first translations seem much less likely to receive introductions, for some reason that i would not be surprised to learn related to expense.

"Invisible Forms" is v. v. light, but that's fine. It would be nice to have a much more exhaustive look at the subject. Oh yes.

I think you're spot on in your thoughts about who gets to give translator's notes. The only additional thing is that if you're putting out the nth translation of some text or other then there's a good chance that you are something of a Famous Translator (otherwise why would they bother publishing your redundant edition, eh?) and so you can leverage an intro. Of course this is in my world where Pierre Joris counts as a famous translator.

What Hurting said. I like to have an idea of the story before I start, which is often what those intros are for.

well to joris's credit no one had yet translated celan's last three volumes in their entireties.

Has anyone read Genette's book on Paratexts? Too expensive to buy, and too long to actually read if I borrowed it from a library. But it looks wonderful.

I have no consistent principle on reading the intros etc. as far as I know. Sometimes I do, sometimes I try to avoid them. Depends on the book, on the mood I'm in. I do tend to avoid the academic-written intros to editions of eg. Penguin Classics, since I would rather read the book unencumbered by someone else's thoughts on it, but sometimes I do read them (especially the older the book is) to see if there's anything contextual which might help me read it.

If I'm teaching something I often read the introductions to the most common editions, just to see where students are likely to borrow opinions from. Actually, in the case of Good Morning Midnight (sorry cozen) I remember getting a good discussion going about what was wrong with A.L. Kennedy's response to Rhys. (And while I like Kennedy's writing, Rhys>>>>>>ALK. (well at least in GMM and Wide Sargasso Sea))

Also I think I prefer rereading to reading, so the spoilers don't bother me. And I think I enjoy knowing that there's something which is considered "a good bit" coming up. (I'm currently reading Herodotus, so when I realized the famous discussion of whether democracy, oligarchy, or monarchy is the ideal form of government was coming up, I was able to get excited about finally reading this famous bit.)

I have been known - especially with ancient stuff like Herodotus - to just read the introduction and skip the actual book.

alex, I would agree with you on rhys Vs. kennedy (well at least GMM and WSS)!

mainly because GMM >>>>>> a lot of books ever.

it's maybe my... favourite book?!

and yeah I love one of kennedy's books, like a friend, but a lot of her writing... I can't find space in it to love.

I quite remember liking kennedy's introduction to GMM but I'll go re-read it again and see if I can spot the gaps.

haha I see that I called kennedy's introduction a "masterpiece of the genre"!

well maybe it is!

: )

When I was a nipper and our teachers assigned us the mandatory Shakespeare's, I would read the text on the right hand side and then would immediately go to the left hand side to read the relevant footnote. I don't do this anymore.

Cynthia Ozick's intro to Seize the Day is downright fantastic.

I remember really liking Alexander Cockburn's intro to The Code Of The Woosters, but I couldn't tell you exactly what it said.

The only thing I remember is that you really got a feeling of "I loved this book and you will too." No doubgt there were some good appetizing extracts. Perhaps there were even a few spoilers, but they didn't feel like spoilers.

Perhaps he was even able to convey in his own prose the lightness of sytle that he learned from the master himself.

I'm digging my own grave on this thread.

This thread is my Aunt Agatha.

What I need right now is one of Jeeves's pick-me-ups.

The last time I tried to read Shakespeare in one of those editions you're talking about, I found it was explaining away things I already knew, and not explaining away curious things that I wanted to know more about. Damn you, capricious footnotes!

Indeed. Did you read Macbeth? Did they explain the bit about "the poor cat i' the adage"?

I pretty much always read it, often more than once. I may read it before or after reading the main text, or even while in the middle of reading the book.

I'm not sure I can adequately explain why. I'm pretty sceptical about lit crit (although that wasn't always true - it may simply be the continuation of a habit formed when I was more gullible).

Hey, I'm back, and I'm in school at last! I'm studying French and Classics... upthread I was moaning over how the intros ruin the plot, right? Well, scratch that for ancient Greek literature. Maybe my professor's just way above par, but his written intro to Electra made the reading of the play itself about fifty times more satisfying than it would have been without. And his one-man dramatic reenactment of the play, well... more entertainment than I've had in the company of others for quite some time. Me like school. Grunt.

Anyway... maybe intros become more valuable as the civilization from which the lit sprunged grows more distant from the reader? I'm about to get out my graph paper...

The thing is, with Greek lit, the audience went in knowing the plot anyways. There's nothing to spoil except the interpretation, and even that you can end up disagreeing with often enough, since (at their best) they're multifaceted.

Ann, you need to stick around more so we can be envious. I am reading Herodotus without a classroom to discuss it in!

alex, i disagree about genette's book being too long. i got it out from our library and read part of it and found it quite entertaining. if not for my, you know, inability to read a book through instead of picking up fifty other ones, i would have finished it by now.