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Walden, Amended

Introduction (continued)

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I retained little from my original encounter with Walden because the opaqueness in places requires concentration and repeated reading to unravel the plain sense. Even so, after reaching the end of a page-long sentence it is too easy to forget the point posed at the beginning. Almost certainly I skipped whole sections and never penetrated to the meaning, as if my path through the woods were interrupted and I lost sight of the trees while picking through the brambles.   

 

Perhaps to the chagrin of Thoreau enthusiasts and scholars, I wish to use an editor’s eye to make him comprehensible to a new audience, a modern one whose sensibilities have changed. Just as we no longer spell willy-nilly, as was common and accepted long ago, we have become impatient with a meandering, digressive style. Now we use dictionaries and standardized spelling; and if the reader is accustomed to prose that is more succinct, then somehow we must find a way to keep valuable works accessible.

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My goal is to elucidate Walden only where necessary; not to simplify it; not to reimagine it; not to adapt, interpret or modernize it. Every paragraph and sentence stays, and stays in its place. Furthermore, I choose to keep gendered language and racist expressions because they are elements of the culture that Walden reflects. In Thoreau’s time America was still largely agrarian, with an implicit, though porous, caste system that excluded women from voting or inheriting personal property. When he makes a statement about “men,” we hear the unspoken assumptions about men and women. Likewise, preserving his use of “savage,” for Native American or indigenous peoples, provokes thought about their treatment during the 19th century, especially in light of Manifest Destiny and an explosive—some say destructive—national expansion. I don’t want to remove the book from its historical milieu or translate it into 21st century diction; instead, I seek to retain Thoreau’s words and—most importantly—his voice. How could I dare change this opening passage?:

 

"When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again."

 

While clearing the brush from our path, these principles guided me:

 

• Edit as little as possible, with only the intent of enhancing clarity

• Keep all paragraphing as written

• Keep readily understandable sentences as written

• Keep all sentences, but if complexity impedes understanding, break text into multiple sentences and/or restructure and add wording for continuity

• Where the intent of a sentence is unclear, follow the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm and leave the text as written

• Keep punctuation as written, or change only when necessary for clarity

 

 

With these I intended to keep the sense that Thoreau is writing in his time, and yet make him readable to us in ours. To succeed, I should have merely tended the trail he already blazed through the woods but not have paved over it. In Walden, Amended, the reader should know which portions have or have not been modified; so sentences that have changed, even by as little as a single comma, are in plain font while unchanged sentences are in bold font.