ok, Jordan, Larry and Cornel, I read this whole discussion now and also listened to the poem "The Haunted House". Concerning the laugh at the end, I will have to agree with Jordan and Larry, and it’s best cut out.
But please, Cornel, it should not be seen as a kind of “censoring” from the side of LibriVox. I think you will agree that your interpretation throughout the poem is very personal and very outgoing, and neither Jordan nor Larry have censored any of that. It’s your interpretation, regardless whether it’s what Cawein had in mind, or what me or any other listener have in mind when they read it. You're the reader so that’s your choice and we accept that. If someone takes offense to your interpretation and thinks they can do it better, then they simply have to register here and do their own recording of it
Let me explain, why the laugh is a different matter altogether. It would come under the LV rule “don’t change what the author wrote”. In this case, Cawein did not include a laugh in his text. If for example the final line had been (I invent now): “...and he laughed while he walked.
Ha ha ha ha ha” (End of poem). Then you would have been absolutely free to read this “ha ha ha ha” either as “boring as you wanted” or as “maniacal as you wanted”, depending on your temperament and how you wanted the poem to feel like.
But he did
not include a written “haha” line, so in this case, you changed the text, you basically invented a line that wasn’t there. It’s not censoring if the DPL points out that you read a line that is not there. Jordan would also have flagged it if your eyes had by mistake slipped to the next poem and out of oversight you had read a line from a different poem (it happens). Then you would have had to cut this line as well, and you cannot really call that "censoring an interpretation", it’s only "correcting an error", and that’s the job of the DPL, to check whether all the lines are there, and no lines that should not be there.
I can give you a good example to illustrate this from one of the poems I read a while ago, if I’m not mistaken it was even a Cawein poem as well. Can’t remember the exact wording, so I’m paraphrasing the lines. It was about an owl and in one line the owl was speaking and the author wrote “who, who, who are you ?”. Here I chose to read the “who” and “you” a bit like the hooting of an owl. So “
whooo, are youuuu”. And that is totally fine and would be acceptable. What would
not have been acceptable is if the author had written: “And the owl told me: Can I show you the way ?” and I would have read “And the owl told me (
hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo = hooting sound done by me) Can I show you the way (
ho-hoooo)” But I could have said: “Can I show
youuuu the way” to make it sound as if an owl was speaking. There is a difference because in the first example I was editing the text and inserting words that are not in the original. I hope you see this difference.
You are still new around here, so you don’t know Larry (or me for that matter) long enough, but we are both very active and very outgoing (and over the top
) in the drama forum, so if anybody can understand interpretation it’s us two, believe me. You should hear Larry’s stage directions in some of the plays, he is not a “boring narrator” but really part of the play when he reads his lines. So your judgement of him here of being censoring is hurtful and quite unfair in his case.
Sonia
