“Copyediting” The Tablets
Tirzah Goldenberg
On November 9, 1981, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, there was an arson attack on Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning in Philadelphia. The water that put out the fire leaked into the rare book room below, damaging both books and cuneiform tablets. My father, president of Dropsie at the time, had the books sent to a company that saved them by freeze-drying and the tablets sent to a laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania. I couldn’t tell you any more about the tablets or the books themselves, what things they spoke of by means of impressions or inks; for me they are only the story of their survival, a tale I’ve saved of my father saving text. It’s up there with his nights spent on the third floor at his great oak desk, reading and not caring for the time. The light in my father’s study at 3:00 a.m. a sign of wellness; walls lined with esoteric books.
“Copyediting” The Tablets was not the work of copyediting per se—I was not to edit for clarity or in accordance with The Chicago Manual of Style. Rather, I was tasked to check the manuscript against the edition published by the National Poetry Foundation in 1999, to keep an eye out for anything amiss in the present transcript. That earlier text and the editions that came before it were of course transcribed from even earlier ones: the original artifacts—what we imagine as the physical clay the scholar encountered, translated, and interpreted, but simultaneously knowing the “fictional” scholar to be Armand Schwerner himself, we bifurcate and know the clay tablets and their wedge-shaped script to exist solely within—indeed to be the very material of—the poet’s esoteric mind. Those ellipses and plus signs representing missing and untranslatable text are both accidental and intentional omissions—they act contemporaneously as that which time has rendered unknowable (for now) and that which the poet has created as lost—lostness part and parcel of the poem’s very structure. (I think, too, of Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho—not only the stuff of saffron and sandals, but the editorial brackets pointing this way and that: here the papyrus has deteriorated, there the potsherd has broken off.) So in a sense my work as copy editor was to read the original clay—the imagination’s original. I was as any other reader of The Tablets.
Schwerner’s book (published by Verge, designed by Crisis) looks a little bit like clay. The title and author impressed on the smooth, matte cover could be wedges. The book is fanciful and hefty, aware of itself as both imaginary and real. The book is the story of the book, a story of paper and of mud and of what we put there, the things we salvage and preserve. I couldn’t tell you any more about the tablets themselves. The date was Kristallnacht. The light from my father’s study meant everything in the dark.
Tirzah Goldenberg is the author of Aleph (2017), Like an Olive (2022), and the forthcoming Overleaf, all from Verge Books. A chapbook, Minor Tractate, will be published by Oxeye Press. She grew up in the Philadelphia area and now lives by the Salish Sea where she works as a freelance editor.
Tirzah Goldenberg
On November 9, 1981, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, there was an arson attack on Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning in Philadelphia. The water that put out the fire leaked into the rare book room below, damaging both books and cuneiform tablets. My father, president of Dropsie at the time, had the books sent to a company that saved them by freeze-drying and the tablets sent to a laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania. I couldn’t tell you any more about the tablets or the books themselves, what things they spoke of by means of impressions or inks; for me they are only the story of their survival, a tale I’ve saved of my father saving text. It’s up there with his nights spent on the third floor at his great oak desk, reading and not caring for the time. The light in my father’s study at 3:00 a.m. a sign of wellness; walls lined with esoteric books.
“Copyediting” The Tablets was not the work of copyediting per se—I was not to edit for clarity or in accordance with The Chicago Manual of Style. Rather, I was tasked to check the manuscript against the edition published by the National Poetry Foundation in 1999, to keep an eye out for anything amiss in the present transcript. That earlier text and the editions that came before it were of course transcribed from even earlier ones: the original artifacts—what we imagine as the physical clay the scholar encountered, translated, and interpreted, but simultaneously knowing the “fictional” scholar to be Armand Schwerner himself, we bifurcate and know the clay tablets and their wedge-shaped script to exist solely within—indeed to be the very material of—the poet’s esoteric mind. Those ellipses and plus signs representing missing and untranslatable text are both accidental and intentional omissions—they act contemporaneously as that which time has rendered unknowable (for now) and that which the poet has created as lost—lostness part and parcel of the poem’s very structure. (I think, too, of Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho—not only the stuff of saffron and sandals, but the editorial brackets pointing this way and that: here the papyrus has deteriorated, there the potsherd has broken off.) So in a sense my work as copy editor was to read the original clay—the imagination’s original. I was as any other reader of The Tablets.
Schwerner’s book (published by Verge, designed by Crisis) looks a little bit like clay. The title and author impressed on the smooth, matte cover could be wedges. The book is fanciful and hefty, aware of itself as both imaginary and real. The book is the story of the book, a story of paper and of mud and of what we put there, the things we salvage and preserve. I couldn’t tell you any more about the tablets themselves. The date was Kristallnacht. The light from my father’s study meant everything in the dark.
Tirzah Goldenberg is the author of Aleph (2017), Like an Olive (2022), and the forthcoming Overleaf, all from Verge Books. A chapbook, Minor Tractate, will be published by Oxeye Press. She grew up in the Philadelphia area and now lives by the Salish Sea where she works as a freelance editor.