close reading

[ROBERT A ROTHSTEIN]

        My graduate-school colleague Earl Sampson brings back fond
memories of the fall of 1960, when he and I (and every Slavist in
the neighborhood) were participant-observers of Roman Jakobson's
very slow reading of the Igor' Tale.  If my lecture notes are to
be believed, in the course of that semester we got as far as line
29 ("Div" klichet" vr"khu dreva...") out of 218, having spent
three weeks or so (my memory, not my notes) on the title alone.

        Although it's not in my lecture notes, I too remember Roman
Osipovich quoting his teacher Shcherba's definition of philology
as the art of slow reading.  And indeed, in the 1982 Jerusalem
edition of his conversations with Krystyna Pomorska (_Besedy_,
84) we read:

                V kotoryi-to raz ia snova ubedilsia v pravote i plodo-
                tvornosti lansirovannogo chutkim lingvistom L. V.
                Shcherboi tezisa o tom, chto filologiia -- eto nauka
                medlennogo i povtornogo chteniia.

In the 1983 English edition the corresponding passage reads:

                Thus I was able once again to convince myself of the
                correctness of Lev Vladimirovich Shcherba's idea that
                philology is factually the science of slow and
                repeated reading.

(Cited from the 1988 MIT Press paperback, p. 108.)

        Incidentally, the Jakobson-Pomorska conversations provide
material for what could be an interesting philological exercise.
They were apparently first published in French translation
(1980), then in Spanish (1981), and only later in the original
Russian (1982).  The copyright page of the 1988 edition indicates
that the 1983 English translation (from the French edition, it
seems) was copyrighted by MIT and Cambridge University Press.
There is a somewhat mysterious acknowledgment of an "[i]nitial
translation from the French by Christian Hubert," but no indica-
tion as to who revised or edited the published translation.

                                Bob Rothstein