What Is Authorial Philology?
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Contents Preface vii Introduction to the English Translation ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction xiii Paola Italia and Giulia Raboni A defnition of authorial philology xiii The critical edition in authorial philology xiii (Authorial) philology and critics (of variants) xiv From Petrarch’s Canzoniere to modern texts xvi History, methods, examples xvii One discipline, diferent skills xviii Digital editions and common representations xx 1. History 1 Paola Italia and Giulia Raboni 1.1 Author’s variants from a historical Perspective 1 1.2 Methods throughout history: from Ubaldini to 3 Moroncini 1.3 Authorial philology and criticism of variants 6 1.4 Authorial philology and critique génétique 11 1.5 Dante Isella’s authorial philology 13 1.6 Authorial philology in the digital era 18 1.7 Authorial philology in the latest decade 22 2. Methods 29 Paola Italia 2.1 The text 29 2.2 The apparatus 37 2.3 Variants 47 2.4 Marginalia and alternative variants 57 vi What is Authorial Philology? 2.5 Diacritic signs and abbreviations 59 2.6 How to prepare a critical edition 62 3. Italian Examples 71 Paola Italia and Giulia Raboni 3.1 Petrarch: The Codice degli abbozzi 71 3.2 Pietro Bembo: The Prose della volgar lingua 76 3.3 Tasso: The Rime d’amore 83 3.4 Alessandro Manzoni: Fermo e Lucia and the seconda 89 minuta 3.5 Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti 98 3.6. Carlo Emilio Gadda’s work 107 4. European Examples 113 4.1 Lope de Vega’s La Dama Boba 113 Marco Presotto and Sònia Boadas 4.2 Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Poems 122 Margherita Centenari 4.3 Jane Austen’s The Watsons 133 Francesco Feriozzi 4.4 Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu 139 Carmela Marranchino 4.5 Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot 149 Olga Beloborodova, Dirk Van Hulle and Pim Verhulst References 161 Glossary 181 List of Illustrations 187 Preface Almost a century after its birth, and after the publication of many editions across the whole gamut of Italian literature, authorial philology has only recently been recognized as an autonomous discipline — as one separate from traditional philology (philology of the copy, which specifcally studies variants introduced through transmission); as having its own history and its own methodologies; and as able to provide increasingly refned research tools that can deepen our knowledge of texts through the analysis of their internal history. In this way, authorial philology has led to critical achievements of major note. This renewed interest is due, on one hand, to the high degree of theoretical evolution achieved by the discipline in the context of Italian literature, in which pioneering critical editions have been produced and have established themselves as efective reference models even with regard to the European scene. This interest is also due, on the other hand, to the ever-growing technical developments in the methodologies by which variants are represented and in the tools for reproducing manuscripts. In recent years, such tools and methodologies, with the introduction of the digitalization of images, have revolutionized the work of philologists, ofering far superior fdelity compared to the physical reproductions of the past, and giving the possibility to work interactively on the image, not only by enlarging single papers or details, but also through the synoptic vision of witnesses housed in archives and libraries that are often very far apart. Also notable here are innovations in applying graphic contrast flters that allow the researcher to achieve visual results that are far superior even to those provided by the direct consultation of the manuscript. This book aims to provide the frst synthetic overview of this discipline, charted through its history (see Chapter 1), which has not yet been systematically investigated so far, through the methods (see viii What is Authorial Philology? Chapter 2) used in daily philological work, and above all through concrete examples set out in chronological order (see Chapter 3). We will examine the problem of authorial variants in critical editions of some of the most important works of Italian literature, from the fourteenth to the twentieth century, from Petrarch’s Codice degli abbozzi to the Rime d’amore by Torquato Tasso, from Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti to Alessandro Manzoni’s Fermo e Lucia, and onto Carlo Emilio Gadda’s novels and short stories. In an Italian context, these authors’ names are intricately bound up with the work of the philologists Gianfranco Contini and Dante Isella, who promoted a fruitful interaction between criticism of variants and authorial philology, with Isella developing this interaction into a full-fedged philological discipline with its own system of representation in his philological work and teaching. The development of this discipline is also indebted to the major achievements of the philological school of Pavia. We, the authors of this book, carried out our training in Pavia, where we found a stimulating environment enlivened by the contributions of major scholars such as Cesare Bozzetti, Franco Gavazzeni, Luigi Poma and Cesare Segre. There, with many of our fellow students we gathered the fruits of that active decade between the end of the sixties and early eighties, a period recalled by Isella himself in a lecture held in Pavia in 1999. On that occasion, Isella expressed the hope that someone ‘would take the initiative to historicize the overall picture and carefully retrace the times and the facts, identifying the directions in which we have been going so far and recognizing the specifc character of the Italian school in relation to the theoretical positions and editorial initiatives of other countries such as Germany, France and Spain’ (Isella 2009a: 241). He also recalled how most editions of ‘in feri texts’ were constituted ‘by works undertaken in the Pavia area’, works that had allowed the development of ‘ecdotic models and criteria that can be perfectly used without us having to invent each time diferent, untested solutions’ (ibid.: 244). This book aims to ofer a frst contribution to this yet unwritten history, and to also act as a token of gratitude for such a great teacher. Milan, 2010 Paola Italia and Giulia Raboni Introduction to the English Translation At a time when written creativity no longer manifests itself through pen, but rather through keyboard, the growing interest inspired by authorial variants has led us to promote the English translation of the manual which, in 2010, frst presented the history, methods and most signifcant cases of authorial philology, the branch of philology that deals with variants due to the author’s intentional desire to change the text, rather than with its transmission. Before authorial philology was ‘ofcially’ founded by Dante Isella, and even before Gianfranco Contini theorized and practiced his ‘criticism of variants’ in the 1930s by working on autographs by Italian authors such as Petrarch, Ludovico Ariosto and Giacomo Leopardi, but also on Marcel Proust and Stéphane Mallarmé, the existence of authorial variants had already been recognized in classical texts by Giorgio Pasquali. The peculiarity of the ‘Italian case’ has two main bases. The frst is the existence of a large number of autographs bearing authorial variants, starting from the ‘Codice degli abbozzi’ (the twenty pages that testify to the frst version of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, containing corrections to 57 of the 365 poetic texts of the collection, which Petrarch decided to keep ‘non illorum dignitati, sed meo labori consulens’ (‘not for their merit but for my efort’; Rerum Familiarum Libri, I, 1: 10).