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Far off the usual (and not the promised third post on the First Amendment), but it's late at night and I can't sleep and this has been nagging at me, so: Two weeks ago the daily New York Times published a review of Philip Larkin's "Collected Poems." The review "quoted" -- the scare quotes matter here, and watch where the quotation marks come in the "quotation" -- Larkin's famous poem, This Be the Verse. Here's the poem as "quoted" in the Times: Your Mum and Dad, they mess you up/"They may not mean to, but they do/They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you."
Notice where the quotation begins? And why there? Because the poem -- by common agreement one of the great short poems in English from the late twentieth century (and some of those qualifiers can probably be stripped out) -- actually begins, "Your Mum and Dad, they fuck you up."
Now, I understand the Times's problem. As the Public Editor put it to me in response to an e-mail, "the Times stylebook says 'we very, very rarely print obscene words like "fuck.'" Of course, "very, very rarely" doesn't mean "never," and one might think that quoting a great poem in which the double meaning of "fuck you up"is one element of its greatness could cross the threshold.
But, OK, maybe not. Still, bowdlerizing -- "paraphras[ing]," as the Public Editor put it (to "capture[] virtually all but the offending word") -- doesn't seem the right solution. Larkin wrote a lot of great poems, a couple of which were also quoted in the review. It would have been better to do no more than name This Be the Verse.
I leave the parodies that flow almost naturally from the idea of "paraphrasing" a poem by changing one word as an exercise for the reader. Posted
3:27 AM
by Mark Tushnet [link]