My answer to your question is "Sure, go for it" but I have a possibly-interesting wrinkle:
I haven't read _The Night Land_. I *have* read a volume called _The Dream of X_, which is _The Night Land_ literally decimated: Hodgson (himself, his own hand) condensed the thing down to 20k words. According to the liner notes, he did this for copyright reasons -- printed a tiny number of copies (perhaps none beyond proofs), sent one proof to the Library of Congress, and let it vanish out of mind.
My edition is a 1977 reprint by Sam Moskovitz (Donald M. Grant, Publisher) (with illustrations by Stephen Fabian).
It's... well, it's still hard to read, but at novella-length it's not a strain to put up with. (I cannot imagine trying to do this for ten times as long.) And it's pretty smooth. It's presented as "charred fragments discovered in an iron box", and occasionally there's an in-character footnote of the "here six thousand pages were obscured by inky cat tracks" sort, but it is in fact a novella-sized story.
I don't know where that puts you. But your translation idea would be the *second*-most severe change the text had ever seen.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2011-05-13 05:12 am (UTC)I haven't read _The Night Land_. I *have* read a volume called _The Dream of X_, which is _The Night Land_ literally decimated: Hodgson (himself, his own hand) condensed the thing down to 20k words. According to the liner notes, he did this for copyright reasons -- printed a tiny number of copies (perhaps none beyond proofs), sent one proof to the Library of Congress, and let it vanish out of mind.
My edition is a 1977 reprint by Sam Moskovitz (Donald M. Grant, Publisher) (with illustrations by Stephen Fabian).
It's... well, it's still hard to read, but at novella-length it's not a strain to put up with. (I cannot imagine trying to do this for ten times as long.) And it's pretty smooth. It's presented as "charred fragments discovered in an iron box", and occasionally there's an in-character footnote of the "here six thousand pages were obscured by inky cat tracks" sort, but it is in fact a novella-sized story.
I don't know where that puts you. But your translation idea would be the *second*-most severe change the text had ever seen.