Chapter 10. Additions Unique to Pride and Prejudice

Over the last two installments we saw twenty-nine kinds in the Pride and Prejudice folder: thirteen skeletal materials made for any work, and sixteen kinds of flesh brought by this work’s period and motifs. This time we see the last bundle—six kinds outside the standard classification.

The standard classification is a set of vessels prepared before we handle a work. It would be ideal if they held everything, but some works have shapes of their own and will not fit entirely within standard vessels. Pride and Prejudice had such shapes. In the course of work, there comes a moment when the intuition arises: “This is not in the standard, but this work absolutely needs it.” At that moment we add material without hesitation. The standard is a starting point, not a destination.

30. Complete Group List

An expansion of the character list. Beyond individual people, it separately indexes group units that function as collections of people.

Pride and Prejudice has many kinds of groups: military groups (the Meryton militia and regular army); family units (the Bennets, Darcys, Bingleys, Collins line, de Bourghs); social classes (the British gentry and London merchant class); institutional groups (the lines benefiting from or harmed by entail); and informal factions (Collins’s Hunsford parish circle and Pemberley estate staff). One person can belong to several groups: Darcy is head of the Darcy family, a member of the British gentry, lord of Pemberley, and Lady Catherine’s nephew.

We make group-level material because many actions in the novel are performed by groups rather than individuals. “All Meryton believed Wickham’s false testimony”; “the Bennet family was disgraced”; “the militia moved to Brighton.” When such sentences are translated, the Korean weight is accurate only when the group’s composition and character are clear.

31. Complete Miscellaneous List

This gathers every item that fits none of the four categories—people, places, objects, groups: institutions, customs, kinds of dance, time markers, abstract concepts.

Some representative entries: Michaelmas, 29 September, an English quarter day and time marker. From the line that Bingley arrived at Netherfield at Michaelmas, we establish that the work begins in autumn. Establishment, the abstract concept Mrs. Bennet pursues her whole life, meaning her daughters’ “setting up” in marriage and a household; repeated in the novel, it motivates every Bennet marriage decision. Reel, a kind of ball dance around which Darcy and Elizabeth conduct a delicate contest. Patronage, the system that explains Collins’s dependence on Lady Catherine.

These items are neither people, places, nor objects. Yet they recur in the work and carry great meaning. Without gathering them separately, they would have no place in any other material.

32. Complete Indeterminate-Reference List

The most interesting material in this installment, and one in which Pride and Prejudice’s particularity appears most strongly.

The novel’s language is rich in pronouns and demonstratives. On a page, “it,” “that matter,” “this person,” “so,” and “in any case” may occur several times in a single sentence—expressions such as it, that, this, the matter, and the affair in English.

What these ambiguous references indicate is not always clear. Two figures exchange a short dialogue and one drops the line, “I have heard of it.” What precisely is it? The event mentioned just before? A person’s reputation? Or both? In Korean, “I too heard of that affair” and “I too heard about it” produce different tones according to the referent.

We therefore made a document that tracks every ambiguous reference in the entire work and states its referent. Each row contains the chapter and line, original quotation, reference term, referent, and recommended Korean rendering. About sixty entries are organized across the work.

It is decisive for Pride and Prejudice because its narrator enters characters’ minds through free indirect discourse. The more inward the utterance, the more ambiguous its reference: characters know what the “it” is and do not need to unpack it. We must specify each unspoken referent so that the characters’ interiors do not become ambiguous in Korean.

Few other works need this. Moby-Dick has an explicit narrator, Ishmael, who explains everything; City of God is theological argument and its references are precise; Frankenstein is epistolary and its narrators are clear. Only Pride and Prejudice, through its combination of free indirect discourse and restrained satire, abounds in ambiguous references, so this material was made only for it.

33. Anachronistic Forbidden Words

A supplement to the period-language dictionary (Common Core No. 7). Where that dictionary handles how to render English words of 1813 into Korean, this material handles Korean words that must never be used when rendering the speech of an 1813 character.

Take “stress.” It began to be used as a medical term in the late nineteenth century and became everyday vocabulary only in the twentieth; a person in 1813 does not say, “I am under so much stress.” Yet a careless Korean translation—“I am so stressed”—breaks the period. About forty Korean words prohibited in character speech are listed: stress, trauma, chemistry (between people), condition, mentality, and more.

This material preserves a novel’s period down to the level of characters’ speech.

34. Hidden Networks of Character Relations

An index of implicit relations not explicitly set out in the work.

Pride and Prejudice contains several connections briefly mentioned but full of implication. Mrs. Gardiner lived in Lambton, Derbyshire before marriage and knew Pemberley’s former owner, Darcy’s father; it is mentioned in one line. Yet that line gives weight to the entire later Pemberley visit. If one knows she is not seeing Pemberley for the first time but again after twenty-five years, the depth of her gaze is translated differently.

Another example: Darcy’s father trusted Wickham’s father, his estate manager, for thirty years; this trust led to Wickham growing up in the Darcy household as the godson’s son. Darcy explains this once in his letter (Chapter 35). Without the background, the weight of Wickham’s lies cannot be conveyed: he was not merely a swindler but once a member of the Darcy family.

About twenty such hidden ties are indexed. The relationship map (Common Core No. 1) handles explicit relations; this material handles unspoken thickness.

35. Character-by-Event-and-Place Relationship Map

A supplementary material combining the relationship map and chronology.

If the relationship map is the plane of who stands beside whom, this is a matrix of who was where and when. A row holds a character and a column an event or place; the intersection marks whether the character was at the event (●), at the same place (◐), knew only by letter (○), or was absent (-).

Why is this matrix needed? Because a character’s absence can carry meaning. How Darcy participated in Bingley’s departure from Netherfield (Event 19) is not directly explained, but the absence matrix reveals that Darcy was in London with Bingley then. That location helps us judge the weight of Event 27, Fitzwilliam’s revelation.

It also records who was present in a scene. When Darcy behaves strangely toward Elizabeth in the Hunsford drawing room—sitting silently for ten minutes—who is with them? The matrix shows that Charlotte and Maria Lucas are present. The way their gaze affects the scene’s awkwardness enters the translation.

One Extra — Adaptation Screenplay Guide

Beyond the standard thirty-five kinds, the Pride and Prejudice folder contains one more material: an adaptation guide.

Pride and Prejudice has repeatedly been made into screen works—the BBC drama (1995), the Keira Knightley film (2005), and attempts at Korean adaptation. Our work centers on translation, but we included one guide for adaptation in the folder.

The guide organizes core scenes that must remain (the Meryton ball, first proposal, letter, walk of recognition, Pemberley, elopement, second proposal); scenes that can be compressed (a detailed treatment of Collins’s proposal); scenes that can be omitted (some Mary and Kitty scenes); and visual-priority questions (how to handle free indirect discourse on screen).

This material does not belong to our standard four-tier classification, nor is it directly used for translation. But given the character of Pride and Prejudice, it naturally came to occupy a place as an extra.

What the Six Create Together

These six, plus the one extra, are not materials we make for every work. They were added to fit the shape of Pride and Prejudice. Applied to Moby-Dick, a different six would be made instead—perhaps an “estimate of a whaling ship’s daily schedule,” “supplementary index of whale taxonomy,” and “dictionary of sailors’ multinational origins.”

If the standard thirty-five are our vessels for handling a work, these six additions are temporary vessels made for what will not fit inside. Temporary, but decisive: without the complete indeterminate-reference list, the translation of Pride and Prejudice’s free indirect discourse would have become ambiguous; without the anachronistic forbidden-word list, modern vocabulary would have entered characters’ speech.

A work’s shape changes the standard. That is the final reason the six-stage process produces different results for each work.

Preview of the Next Part

We have now looked, one by one, at the thirty-five kinds plus one extra in the Pride and Prejudice folder. The next part, Part 4, opens another large bundle in the folder: character notes, one person at a time. The next installment covers the note for protagonist Elizabeth Bennet; the following one covers the note for supporting character Charlotte Lucas. We then see the note for minor character Mrs. Reynolds, the folder’s auxiliary files, and the division-of-labor technique by which we quickly make notes for thirty-four characters. The final installment considers how material integrity is guaranteed and concludes all fourteen installments.

This installment has shown every kind of material. We now turn to character notes to see how those materials are condensed into the form of living people.