Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End: Annotating, Editing, and Translating

(c) Alfred Cohen, 1995
(c) Alfred Cohen, 1995

This is the web site for an international collaborative project, the core aims of which are to:

§ Provide annotations for the novels
§ Produce a reliable edition of the English text
§ Translate Parade’s End into several different languages

The project was launched in 1999. The first two core aims were completed in 2010, through the collaborative production of the first annotated critical edition of Parade’s End, appearing as four separate volumes published by Carcanet Press, Manchester:

Some Do Not . . ., ed. Max Saunders (2010)

No More Parades, ed. Joseph Wiesenfarth (2011)

A Man Could Stand Up —, ed. Sara Haslam (2011)

Last Post, ed. Paul Skinner (2011)

The project continues to assist the production of translations. It represents an innovative collaboration between editors, translators, and literary scholars. It aids the translators to have online advice about textual problems, as well as annotations of obscure passages, and the solutions already proffered by other translators. The translators’ close engagement with the text has also complemented the editorial process in three crucial ways. Editors argue that they have to annotate in order to understand a text; translators commonly claim they have to understand a text more closely than editors do. Queries from translators have alerted the editors both to textual corruptions and to ambiguities or obscurities previously missed by Anglophone editors. The translators have also sharpened awareness of allusions to other literatures.

Teams of translators working in several different languages have been involved. The first fruits of this effort, sponsored by the EC via the COTEPRA project (and consisting of translations of the opening into seven languages, together with methodological commentaries by the translators) were published in Interpreting/Translating Modernism: A Comparative Approach, ed. Elena Lamberti (University of Bologna: COTEPRA, 2001), pp. 155-208.

Since then, complete translations have been published in German and Spanish.

German:

Manche tun es nicht (2005); Keine Paraden mehr (2006); Der Mann, der aufrecht blieb (2007); and Zapfenstreich (2009)

all translated by Joachim Utz, and published by Eichborn.

Spanish:

El final del desfile, translated by Miguel Temprano Garcia (Lumeneditorial; Tra edition, 2009)

There are currently translators working in the following languages: French, Italian, and Swedish. The teams vary in size, and some still need further translators.

Translators working in other languages would also be very welcome. Please contact the project co-ordinator, Max Saunders, if you would like to participate: max.saunders@kcl.ac.uk

Click on the links below for annotations to the text, the publishing history of Parade’s End, details of other translations of Ford’s work, select bibliographies relating to the tetralogy and comparable works by other writers, and Ford scholarship.