But after the Missoulian ran a story last Sunday about McKusick's sleuthing and his poetic find, the Davidson Honors College dean at the University of Montana found himself in the international spotlight.
These days, his phone is ringing off the hook and his e-mail is flooded with interview requests from media in the United Kingdom.
“This has really got some bounce to it,” McKusick said.
Thursday morning, McKusick was the star of BBC Radio of London's morning show, called “Today.”
McKusick helped crack the case of a 36-year-old hunt to prove that an 1820 anonymous, commercial translation of the provocative German telling of the Faust legend was the work of Britain's famed poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Collaborating with a California-based colleague, Frederick Burwick, McKusick dug into archives to find several “smoking guns” to prove the translation was the work of Coleridge. At UM, McKusick used a cutting-edge methodology - a computer analysis called stylometrics - to determine the author's “fingerprint” on the translation.
Like a real fingerprint, all writers have a preference for certain words and use those words in patterns that make their style unmistakable. The computer analysis is yet another way to prove the author of the translation with a degree of “high probability,” McKusick said.
In March, McKusick and Burwick will present their discovery at a conference in California. In September, Oxford University Press will publish the translation, findings and supporting documentation in a book co-edited by McKusick and Burwick and titled “Faustus: From the German of Goethe Translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.”
“I had a sense this might happen,” McKusick said. “I wasn't sure, but now that it is happening, it's very exciting.”
Reporter Betsy Cohen can be reached at 523-5253 or at bcohen@missoulian.com
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