Ćwiczenia C2 Gapped Text (Bezpłatnie)

Autorski, niezależny materiał dydaktyczny. Konto nie jest wymagane. Wynik liczy poprawne odpowiedzi w tym przykładzie, nie punkty egzaminacyjne.

When I agreed to edit a new edition of Mara Venn’s novel Northern Rooms, the brief seemed straightforward: return to the manuscripts and produce the text the author really intended. Previous editions differed, sometimes replacing a sentence and sometimes rearranging a scene. A definitive edition, the publisher suggested, would finally remove the need to worry about these discrepancies. I initially found the promise appealing.

(1) ________

That absence mattered because our task involved choosing, not simply recovering. The material included notebooks, loose pages and a typescript annotated by at least two people. Some corrections were unmistakably Venn’s; others could have belonged to a copy-editor. First we had to establish the documents’ sequence. Then we could ask whether a change represented an author’s revision, a production error or someone else’s attempt to smooth an awkward sentence.

(2) ________

This material evidence produced a chronology more reliable than the handwriting alone. Yet later did not automatically mean more authoritative. One alteration accommodated a magazine’s demand for a shorter extract. Another appeared only in a copy sent to a friend. The changes were equally late, but their purposes differed. Privileging them indiscriminately would substitute the apparent neutrality of a date for a judgement about the circumstances.

(3) ________

This was the point at which I abandoned the idea that our uncertainty was merely temporary. It belonged to the record itself. We could make responsible decisions, but not pretend that only one interpretation was possible. The publisher was sympathetic until I mentioned placing competing versions of a passage on the printed page rather than quietly choosing between them.

(4) ________

The two passages consequently appeared together in a trial booklet, each with an account of its origin. Readers did not report the paralysis we feared. Several said the difference sharpened their attention to the narrator’s evasions. Others preferred a continuous text and consulted the alternative afterwards. The problem seemed less the presence of alternatives than how we presented them. We therefore distinguished the reading route from its supporting evidence.

(5) ________

The separation made the printed book manageable without discarding the fuller record. A new difficulty arose when an audio producer approached us. A printed note can sit unobtrusively beside a passage; a spoken note interrupts it and takes time to hear. Transferring the apparatus into the recording unchanged would not preserve the reader’s experience. It would impose a different rhythm on the novel.

(6) ________

Hearing the alternatives in those separate recordings revealed an effect I had missed on the page: a repeated phrase sounded defensive in one version and merely hesitant in the other. This did not establish Venn’s preference. It reminded us that decisions acquire consequences through a particular medium. The finding went into our introduction, explaining why the main recording followed one reading while additional material allowed comparison.

(7) ________

That invitation survived into the final edition. We described our method, identified unresolved passages and made manuscript images available. This guaranteed neither that readers would investigate nor that future editors would agree. It made disagreement possible on stated grounds. The publisher eventually replaced definitive with documented. I prefer the less triumphant description: it promises a defensible account of our decisions rather than an impossible end to the novel’s history.

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