APO AE 09213-1315
August 30, 1994
Editor
Harvard Magazine
7 Ware Street
Cambridge, MA 02138-4001
Dear Sir:
Always enjoy getting my Harvard Magazine . First off, please note change in my APO address. Mail still arrives via the old APO, but the new one gets things here a few days faster.
I'm always interested in your Letters to the Editor column. Most of grow inured to the errors of the contemporary media: mispronunciations, misspellings, mis-attributions, and just plain misinformation. But we seem to expect more of Harvard. So here's my own contribution.
The July-August issue just received carries a fascinating box on page 13 about Mother Goose (or Ma Mere a L'oye as your headline has it). George Steiner, the renowned Cambridge (England) Professor of English and Comparative Literature tells us in his After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation that the "a ", in some early French editions of Mother Goose is no more than an error of insertion by a less than grammatical printer. Says Steiner, "with the 'a ' the title can mean no other than 'My mother has a goose' or, alternatively, 'My mother at the goose' or the very least 'from the goose' (which is just how my own less than scholarly French would read it). According to Steiner, either way makes no sense, and the error was quickly corrected in later editions by simply dropping the "a ". Steiner pleads that people who should know better should quit retailing the printers error version. Bolstering his "printer's error" thesis, he asserts that other early editions also display variant capitalizations and some spell l'oie as l'oye (apparently the version your writer picked up).
As I write this letter I find myself suspecting that the thought the printer intended to clarify through inserting the infelicitous "a " was to signify something like "Mother's Tales from the [barnyard] Goose" -- or, perhaps, "barnyard goose style tales" ( a la often having the sense of 'according to', or 'in the style of'). The best English meaning might thus be "My Mother's Silly Goose Tales". Which at least explains the thought the printer was trying to express in making his infelicitous insertion.
My point in writing is that not all Harvard Magazine readers will have access to Steiner, who after all was in part educated at Harvard and was for two years a Fellow at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies before becoming an editor at The Economist and later still Professor at Yale. Perhaps Harvard Magazine can find two inches in your next edition to support Steiner's thesis so that your readers who are some of the best educated people in the world will not further this trivial error in passing on to their children (or, in my case, grandchildren) tales from Mother Goose.
Sincerely,
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