In Europe copyright is 70 years from death of writer. You cannot renew or extend copyright by publlishing 'New' 'Collected' or 'Official' editions, or rather a new copyright would apply at best only to the new text if it differed in some important way from the original. The sad manoeuvres of the Joyce estate and their spurious recent editions of Ulysses are relevant here. Joyce, who died in 1941, is out of copyright. Ungaretti, who died in 1970, is not. Cavafy died in 1933 and according to my (1951) Mavrogordato translation, there was a "complete edition published in Alexandria in 1935". You do not need anyone's permission to publish either your translations or Cavafy's originals. I am mystified by Andrew Frisardi's remarks about Dante: the publication of an 'official' edition - presumably of the Vita Nova - in 1932 or today would have no relevance to publishing either Dante or Frisardi's Dante, so long as some marginally older text was used (assuming that the editor of the 1932 edition was still about in 1942 and claiming some kind of uniqueness to his efforts). Is there not some American professor hogging Emily Dickinson's copyrights on the grounds of his superior scholarly text? But even there, you can publish (and translate from) her earlier editions to your heart's content.
Creeping copyright should be resisted.
Yrs
Philip
Last edited by Philip Morre; 06-26-2012 at 02:56 PM.
Reason: 1923 changed to 1932 aftr rereading Frisardi
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