The collected works of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. 01 (of 11) — John Shaqi
The collected works of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. 01 (of 11)Ibsen, Henrik
General
The collected works of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. 01 (of 11)
Ibsen, Henrik
Ibsen, Henrik, 1828-1906 -- Translations into English; Norwegian drama -- Translations into English
A point of typography perhaps deserves remark. The Norwegian (and
German) method of indicating emphasis by spacing the letters of a
word, _thus_, has been adopted in this edition. It is preferable for
various reasons to the use of italics. In dramatic work, for one
thing, emphases have sometimes to be indicated so frequently that
the peppering of the page with italics would produce a very ugly
effect. But a more important point is this: the italic fount
suggests a stronger emphasis than the author, as a rule, intends.
The spacing of a word, especially if it be short, will often escape
the eye which does not look very closely; and this is as it should
be. Spacing, as Ibsen employs it, does not generally indicate any
obtrusive stress, but is merely a guide to the reader in case a
doubt should arise in his mind as to which of two words is intended
to be the more emphatic. When such a doubt occurs, the reader, by
looking closely at the text, will often find in the spacing an
indication which may at first have escaped him. In almost all cases,
a spaced word in the translation represents a spaced word in the
original. I have very seldom used spacing to indicate an emphasis
peculiar to the English phraseology. The system was first introduced
in 1897, in the translation of _John Gabriel Borkman_. It has no
longer even the disadvantage of unfamiliarity, since it has been
adopted by Mr. Bernard Shaw in his printed plays, and, I believe, by
other dramatists.
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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