 |
III
Studies in bibliography |  |
III
Scholarly attempts to go beyond the texts of existing documents to-
ward
closer re-creations of what authors wanted have always provoked
doubt and
criticism. Those in the field of Anglo-American literature who
have recently
imagined the "hegemony of the Greg-Bowers-Tanselle re-
gime" (to use a
typical description), seem unaware that the controversy
over editorial
freedom and eclectic practices winds backwards in a cycle
yond, wherein, furthermore, the favorable position has been less than
dominant.[39] Even the leveling of the charge of "Platonism" against edito-
rial eclecticism is not a new pastime, as the experience of Bowers's first
critical texts nearly half a century ago demonstrates. A few new features
of the opposition to editorial eclecticism have been observed, including
the belittlement of the author and the corresponding aggrandizement of
non-authorial contributions to the text. The striking feature of much of
the criticism, however, is the absence of careful analysis of editions and
critical texts and the presence in its place of sweeping generalities, often
cast in philosophical language, and leaning, to one or another degree, on
jargon. The following crowded passage, taken from David Greetham's
Theories of the Text, epitomizes most of the arguments.
successfully suppressed some of the interests of its readers by co-opting them in a
cognitive act of self-representation, exactly as Althusser suggests that ideology as cog-
nition must do. The ideal reader, indeed the only functioning reader, of the eclectic,
Platonic text, was one who accepted a Hegelian reconciliation of thesis and antithesis
into the organicism of the Romantic artefact, held together by the single unitary
consciousness of an originary creator. This reader was Hegelian in another sense
too: such a reading assumed that the concrete manifestation of text, particularly
in its social and cultural negotiations with scribes, compositors, publishers' editors,
binders, booksellers, and so on, was merely the superstructure built on the base of
the 'thought' (that is, intention) of the author."[40]
While it may not seem so at first glance, this passage is organized in a
manner helpful to understanding the basic position held by many recent
opponents of critical editing. The usual elements of the false image of the
"Greg-Bowers" editorial approach are present: the Platonic and Roman-
tic
idealism, the overriding faith in the "single unitary consciousness of an
originary creator" (i.e., the author), and the denial of the social dimension
of texts. Yet Greetham goes beyond repetition of this often-seen litany,
when he introduces a charge of Hegelianism, which, while surely sugges-
tive to many readers of an intention to obfuscate matters, can be used to
describes the "Greg-Bowers" editorial approach as Hegelian in two ways.
For the first he attempts to fit two familiar clichés used to describe the
approach—the "Romantic" notion of the ideal text and its companion,
the solitary genius creator—into the Hegelian dialectic. His second use
of the description is the more telling. Accordingly, the reader imagined
by the Greg-Bowers editor is one who accepts that literary works have
their origins in the mind of the author, their material manifestations be-
ing concrete extension ("superstructure") of the original notion (intension,
"base"). Greetham attempts to identify traditional editorial approaches
with "pure" Hegelianism, assuming that to those readers for whom Hege-
lian dialectics is at all meaningful, the meaning is dependent on the great
inversion accomplished by the Left Hegelians (Strauss, Bauer, Stirner,
Feuerbach), and especially, of course, by Marx and Engels. The dialectic
was not set aside in this inversion (except by Feuerbach), but its origina-
tor's ideal starting point was repositioned as extension—as the historically
determined outcome of being. Priority is granted not to the self-moving
absolute idea, but to a dynamic material world—to concrete natural and
anthropological reality. The assumption in Greetham's passage is that
any viewpoint adopting a "pure" Hegelian dialectic—in which nature
and society are mere developmental shadows of the unfolding idea—will
be regarded as quaint or absurd. But absurdity more obviously attaches
to the suggestions that the "Greg-Bowers" editors are wrong, and that
the thoughts of the author somehow do not precede the physical records
made of them. For those who accept the inverted or materialist dialec-
tic, the real begins with the material, but it does not end there. The
thoughts of the author, while not prior in an absolute sense, obviously
precede the records that were made of them, though the records—e.g.,
paper and ink—are basically material in nature and the thoughts are
not. While not images of their obviously posterior records, the thoughts,
however, are images of prior experience of the natural and social world.
The paper and ink display the markings needed for reconstituting these
thoughts, and the fidelity of the representation is the concern of textual
criticism. While the intellectual premises of traditional critical editing
need not be explained within the framework of the historical materialist
outlook, they are fundamentally historical in nature and consequently
do not exceed the boundaries of philosophical materialism. An editor's
personal endorsement of philosophical idealism, on the other hand, does
not directly bear upon his or her reconstruction of a historical moment
in the life of a literary work, since that activity is necessarily governed
by the pertinent evidence and the soundness of the editor's judgment in
working upon it. The ideal character of the reconstruction, furthermore,
of Platonic or Hegelian belief.[41]
In arguments asserting that author-focused editing proceeds from a
belief in
an ethereal perfect text, the eclectic critical text is not easily
discernable. It is described falsely, as the embodiment of the editor's aes-
thetic preferences—an ahistorical amalgamation of favorable readings
taken from various sources. It should be not be necessary to repeat at this
point that what is of concern to the author-focused editor are the prefer-
ences of the author, and how they developed over time, and whether and
where
these conflicted with the preferences of others involved in copying,
publishing, or performing the work being edited. The counter-arguments
gather some force, perhaps, in the word "eclectic," which retains the
ancient connotation of a selection of pleasing philosophical beliefs. One
part of the connotation, selection, does apply to the editorial tradition, as
G. Thomas Tanselle emphasized in his outstanding essay, "Editing with-
out a Copy-Text."[42]
There editors were advised to serve their historical
ends with
critical texts wholly constructed by selecting readings from per-
tinent
sources, rather than emending a pre-existing copy-text. In reason-
ing
beyond the copy-text, a document that has often proved debilitating
of
editorial judgment, Tanselle was seeking to sharpen the historical focus
of
critical editing. With no particular document automatically determin-
ing
questionable readings, the editorial process remains keenly centered
object of the reconstruction. To say that this process is "eclectic" is simply
an acknowledgment that in the effort to account for human intentions and
frailties, and gaps and errors of all kinds, the critical reconstruction nec-
essarily adopts a historical principle of greater compass than that which
might be defined by the texts of particular documents.
A generation earlier, Fredson Bowers, searching for a useful defini-
tion of
eclecticism, noted that in the "purest sense" the term described
"any text
admitting emendation of error," since the "principle of choice
has been
invoked."[43]
Aware of contemporary opposition to eclectic texts,
however, Bowers
recognized that what was at issue involved more than
the correction of
obvious typographical errors in a single document. "Re-
marks on Eclectic
Texts," the essay in which he expressed these thoughts,
was therefore given
over to discussing exemplary situations taken from
British and American
literary works dating from the end of the sixteenth
to the end of the
nineteenth centuries. The diverse examples—including
works from
Shakespeare, Beaumont-Fletcher-Massinger, Fielding, Haw-
thorne, William and
Henry James, and Stephen Crane—allowed Bow-
ers to discuss the
significance of eclectic editorial practices as they grew
more complex along
a range of single- and multiple-authority traditions.
He recognized that
editorial eclecticism had not gained general accep-
tance at the time of his
"Remarks" (1973), writing of the "rigid adherents
of faithful reprints of
one authority in American literature and among
English scholars in relation
to nineteenth-century works."[44]
On the other
hand he noted that at the time, opposition to
eclecticism did not extend
to the works of Shakespeare. The source of the
inconsistency—a failure
to recognize that transmissional carelessness
and intentional tampering
could erode the authority of a work no matter what
period it was created
in—was well understood (if not always clearly
explained or handled) by
Bowers, who had scholarly familiarity with works of
many centuries.
As he acknowledged more than once, Bowers took his conception of
"authority"
from R. B. McKerrow, principally from Prolegomena for the
Oxford Shakespeare, which is to say that he agreed that authority came
from
the author. This definition, as we have seen, runs against recent
attempts
to extend the concept, and also contradicts attempted new
interpretations
of McKerrow's views. His views on this matter were, however,
already
clear enough when he made them explicit. His skepticism concerning
the
editorial ways of predecessors and contemporaries, furthermore, did not
prevent him from distinguishing the text the author intended to publish
(or have performed) from the existing, flawed testimony of it—the
texts of
authoritative document being that which in the editor's opinion must
have deviated least from the author's autograph manuscript—the line
of reasoning that led him to name and formalize the concept of "copy-
text." He intended to emend this document, however, as he made clear in
Prolegomena and even demonstrated in the two tantalizing appended pages
from his projected edition of Richard the Third (to be based on the Folio
text). The sources for the emendations would include authoritative docu-
ments other than the copy-text and also early derived documents—since,
as the author helpfully emphasized, for literature from remote periods
these contain valuable early corrections (or endorsements) of doubtful
readings.
While sometimes viewed as having identified authority with its mate-
rial
(documentary) embodiments, McKerrow was aware of a less tangible
essence of
literary works. The conception of final authorial intention as
expressed in
Prolegomena—an imagined "fair copy, made by the
author
himself, of his plays in the form which he finally intended to give
them"
(p. 6)—did not equate an author's intended text with the text
of any
document existing or lost, including those inscribed by the author.
In at-
tempting to account for the obviously corrupt condition of certain
printed
Renaissance dramas, McKerrow explored the problem of control of the
text in its manifold details, as it moves from copy to copy. In this context
he had cause to discuss the relative merit of a fair copy of a draft manu-
script made by a professional scribe, as opposed to the author, recogniz-
ing in the problem both psychological and practical dimensions.
own work. Its familiarity causes one to pay less minute attention than one would to
a strange piece of writing. One has perhaps in the first draft hesitated between two
words or two forms of expression: in copying one accidentally goes back to the wrong
one—or mixes the two up. One tries to improve as one writes; and the improvement
clashes with something else that one has overlooked, and so on. And even harder
than copying one's own draft is, I think, reading over the copy when finished—at
least unless a considerable time has elapsed since it was written. Thus a writer's own
fair-copy is perhaps on the whole likely to be somewhat less good than one made by
a competent professional copyist and read over by the author, while at the same time
one would expect it to be less legible.[45]
It is doubtful that even today's critics of the early hypotheses of McKerrow
and Greg concerning the origins of the poorly printed plays would take
issue
with these seemingly self-evident observations. On the other hand,
in
pointing out the obvious practical difficulties of producing an accurate
copy of a literary work, and recognizing that even (or especially) authors
are prone to confusion and error when attempting to copy their own
work,
McKerrow called attention to something essential about the nature
of the
written language. To speak only of modern alphabetic writing, this
consists
of complex systems of signs representing single sounds, which
are combined
into groups representing words, and their nonverbal ap-
purtenances,
including inflection (emphasis) and pauses (punctuation), all
further
sequenced within longer syntactical constructions. In long written
works
these constructions are embedded within still larger arrangements
created
according to the author's greater expository, aesthetic, rhetori-
cal, and
logical purposes (whether or not these purposes are partially
responses to
the preferences or demands of others invested with a measure
of influence or
control over the text). At the most narrowly material level,
the outcome is
a great sequence of thousands or hundreds of thousands
of letterforms, other
symbols, and spaces. An author attempting to cre-
ate a precise symbolic
representation of his or her thoughts thus faces
substantial practical
difficulties, which also await anyone trying to make
a faithful copy of the
original.
Yet these marks are intended to convey linguistic meanings, and
while the
meanings are not easily recollected without their corresponding
marks, they
have priority in relation to them. From an awareness of the
linguistic and
material complexities that make all texts difficult to control
and
vulnerable to unintended error, can follow the basic conceptual dis-
tinction between documentary texts and the works they represent. This
distinction makes the editorial goal of authorially intended texts under-
standable, along with the need for judgment-based eclectic practice in
order
to attempt them. The distinction has been thoughtfully explored by
G. Thomas
Tanselle on many occasions, beginning as early as his 1981
essay "The Texts
of Documents and the Texts of Works,"[46]
and most
printed form, A Rationale of Textual Criticism.[47] One of Tanselle's purposes
has been to make plain that the term "verbal work" describes a fairly open
concept, with a formally limitless chronology and content, while a docu-
mentary text is a particular material object, created at a specific point or
points in time. A second purpose has been to clarify the nature of verbal
works using a comparison with works of the plastic arts: unlike paintings
or sculptures, verbal works cannot be directly experienced by beholding
material objects. Our experience of them does depend on documentary
texts, which are material objects, and so may be appreciated for their
physical appearance, and may contain illustrations and decorative fea-
tures intended to be integral parts of the works they represent. The verbal
work per se, however, is not a material object, nor is it communicated by
purely sensational means. Comprehension is basically an intellectual pro-
cess, which begins with a literal interpretation of the sequences of symbols
as transmitted in the documents. These prompt the reader to recall the
words and then re-imagine the thoughts of the author, but the potential
for understanding is regulated from the beginning by the level of accuracy
attained in the sequences of symbols.
While the practical complexity of the written language is the cause of
much
error, it also provides textual criticism with one basis for the reason-
able analysis of the text, whereby puzzling readings are either determined
to be errors and possibly corrected, or endorsed as true. Questionable
passages can be tested against expected linguistic patterns, by considering
them in the light of literary factors such as meaning and prosody, or fac-
tors relating to aspects of the physical document, including handwriting
or
typography, as well as the dimensions of the page or column. These
movement of the text from copy to copy or edition to edition. In reflect-
ing on his restoration of the true name of Sextus Cloelius—a confederate
of Cicero's enemy P. Clodius Pulcher—the late D. R. Shackleton Bai-
ley reviewed the conflicting manuscript readings in Cicero's letters and
speeches, in which the name appears mostly in forms either of Cloelius
or Clodius. He noted that "[c]opyists were under no temptation to make
'Cloelius' out of 'Clodius'. The temptation was all the other way, espe-
cially in view of the association of Sextus with P. Clodius Pulcher."[48] In
addition to the historical context—the association of the two like-named
men—Shackleton Bailey attributed the error—Clodius for Cloelius—to
the likelihood of "el" being miscopied as "d", rather than the other way
around, and demonstrated that the archetype of the various witnesses
must have contained forms for Cloelius.
The title of the article in which this discussion appeared, "Mump-
simus—Sumpsimus," makes a generally useful point about editing, in
referring to the supposed riposte of an errant English priest on being
corrected of his nonsensical misreading in Mass of the phrase, "quod in
ore
sumpsimus" (in the mouth we have taken): "I will not change my old
mumpsimus
for your new sumpsimus" (related by Richard Pace in 1517,
as quoted in the
OED). Erroneous readings tend to live on after they
have been conclusively disestablished, since they can usually claim what
is sometimes (and misleadingly) referred to as "documentary authority."
The presence of a reading in an authoritative document is obviously of
basic editorial interest, but the term is a deceptive syllogism, since docu-
ments can contain errors of every imaginable kind. Many of these can be
detected and repaired by further editorial investigation, the outcome of
which might be a defense of a variant reading present in an alternative
document, or an editorial conjecture—a reading which, though not pres-
ent any existing document, might be the author's own expression, recalled
from oblivion by editorial erudition and brain power. Shackleton Bailey
first published the evidence for his recollection of Cloelius in 1960; he
wrote "Mumpsimus—Sumpsimus" in 1973, partly to record the subse-
quent persistence of "Clodius" in editions of Cicero made by those who
should have known better. W. W. Greg's warnings about the "tyranny" or
"mesmeric influence" of the copy-text, well familiar to readers of Studies in
Bibliography, are meant to teach the same
lesson as the title of Shackleton
editorial principles belong to all historical periods.
Hans Zeller's stricture, mentioned in section II, against editorial at-
tempts to analyze authors' minds would attract many latter-day endorse-
ments, but presumably from those who would reject the author focus of
Zeller's editorial approach. The incongruity applies in both directions,
since most author-focused editors assume their discipline has a psycho-
logical dimension. The concept of authorial intention in editing involves
the editor in an investigation of the author's mind, as well as of the minds
of those involved in copying or publishing the author's work. There are,
obviously, many potential limits on what can be known of the author's
habits, artistic inclinations, and stylistic preferences, and a prudent edi-
tor is always conscious of them. It is, however, in the nature of the edi-
torial temperament to test those limits. In the editing of classical texts,
one of the forms that the concept of authorial intention takes is known
as
usus scribendi, or the author's usual practice, a
criterion for judging
variants which has been worked since at least the days
of Aristarchus. As
with the example from Cicero of paleographic analysis,
usus scribendi was
developed by editors of works
from the remote past, and then adopted
by editors of literature of all
periods. Whether called by its Latin name
or not, it describes an important
dimension in the evaluation of variant
readings from alternate texts
believed to have descended independently
from a lost common ancestor. Given
what is known, for example, of Mark
Twain's early style and preferences, the
doomed cat, sensing that she was
about to be "et up" (rather than "eat up")
was more likely to have been
"a grabbling" (as opposed to "grabbing") for
the flower pot from which
"Fitz Smythe's Horse" was attempting to snatch
her.[49]
The pairs of vari-
ants come from independent contemporary
reprintings of a lost original
printing, and it is nearly certain that only
one is authoritative. In judging
between them, a second criterion, related
to usus scribendi, might also sug-
gest itself to an
editor:
lectio difficilior potior
—the more difficult reading is
preferable. This criterion
is likewise associated with the editing of older
texts, but is equally valid
for texts of all periods; it arises from the obser-
vation that unusual
expressions unfamiliar to copyists (or typesetters) are
exposed to the
danger of being miscopied or replaced by more common
expressions, whether
inadvertently or by interpolation. The difficult vari-
The two criteria converge in the little example from Mark Twain, since
the "author's usual practice" involved a wide vocabulary which included
more than its share of uncommon words or phrases (lectio difficilior). The
convergence is useful to keep in mind, since in the classical field the op-
posite observation about the two criteria has been made: that they work
in different directions, and lead toward divergent results—usus scribendi, it
has been said, moves an editor toward smoother, linguistically normalized
texts, while lectio difficilior favors textual dissonance and idiosyncracy.[50]
This opposition can also be observed in very recent texts, as when Bow-
ers, who used both criteria (though perhaps without awareness of their
Latin names) when he edited Stephen Crane, came upon "glintered" and
"glinted" in alternate authoritative texts. He chose the more common
variant, and thus usus scribendi over lectio difficilior, since he was unable
to locate in Crane another example of "glintered." The dissatisfaction he
expressed over his choice almost certainly arose from his awareness of
Crane's preference for unusual words and spellings.[51]
Paleographic analysis, lectio difficilior, and usus scribendi have been
widely applied in the editing
of works from all periods, though their mer-
its and limitations tend to be
most actively discussed by editors of an-
cient works. Like bibliographic
analysis (of manuscripts as well as printed
books), methods of linguistic
study use the physical evidence of particular
documentary texts, along with
the general properties of the written lan-
guage and the means by which it
is conveyed, to understand the inten-
tions and actions of those who created
the documents—the author as
well as others involved in copying or
publishing the work. Intention is
a basic editorial issue, since linguistic
complexity makes control of the
text hard to achieve. The obligations of the
scholarly editor, whether in
of a modern one, are to understand these intentions and actions as far
as possible, and divulge the results of the analyses that have been under-
taken. These obligations would extend, furthermore, to the hypothesized
social textual edition as well, since the goal of such an edition no less than
an author-centered one would be to lay bare the details of the collabora-
tive and conflicting relationships of the principals involved in the early
performance or publication of the work.
Quotation from W. Speed Hill, "English Renaissance: Nondramatic Literature,"
in
Scholarly Editing, ed. D. C. Greetham (New York:
Modern Language Association of America,
1995), p. 219. An illuminating
discussion of the innovative scholarship of the humanists Angelo
Ambrogini, known as Poliziano (1454–94, also known by his Latin name,
Politian), and Piero
Vettori (1499–1585, a.k.a. Petrus
Victorius) is now available to Anglophone readers in Glenn
W. Most's
welcome edition in translation of the landmark work by Sebastiano Timpanaro
(1923–2000), La genesi del metodo del
Lachmann: see The Genesis of Lachmann's
Method (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005), pp.
46–50. Timpanaro's discussions of further editorial history
are
of course of equal value, each shedding light on particular questions while
contributing to
the work as a whole, which after all becomes an
erudite and absorbing history of the tension
between method and
judgment in editing.
The charges of editorial Platonism, Romanticism, and Hegelianism are worth
examin-
ing for their attempt to supply theoretical justification for
some commonly held misconceptions
about traditional scholarly editing.
Less worthy of examination is the larger context in which
these
charges appear, where, it must be said, an irresponsible attempt is made to
link scholarly
editing in the United States to the "neoconservativism"
of the Reagan and Bush I eras. The
author here strains to prove an
affinity between "neocon" pronouncements about eternal values
(which
he seems to accept as sincere) with the supposed traditional editorial goal
of the perfect
text: "The appeal of Reagan and Bush on the one hand
and textual idealism on the other was
both Edenic and teleological:
Edenic in that both invoked an uncorrupted pristine state of core
'values' before socialization and post-modernism had made all values
contingent; and teleologi-
cal in that both claimed to embody and
complete an essentialism (Americanism, patriotism,
and authoriality,
intention), so that Reaganism and eclecticism could pass themselves off as
the fulfilment of the Scriptures: an end to history. In the case of
eclecticism, this was not just
a metaphor—in the sense that
Francis Fukuyama used the phrase as a defence of Reaganism
and late
capitalism …—but was concrete and practical as well. The
eclecticists produced
'definitive' editions of works that would never
have to be edited again; that is, the editions stood
outside or beyond
the history of their own making, of their own socialization" (Theories of the
Text, p. 372). To this is added
an unsupported assertion about the government's preference for
eclectic editorial methods, which supposedly provide a "long-term return, on
their investment."
It is perhaps symptomatic of the lack of
seriousness with which this argument was assembled
that no mention is
made of the neocons' actual attempts—ostentatious talk about
traditional
values in education aside—to deprive scholarly
editions of American authors of funding.
"Editing without a Copy-Text," Studies in
Bibliography 47 (1994): 1–22, reprinted in
Tanselle,
Literature and Artifacts (Charlottesville:
Bibliographical Society of the University of
Virginia, 1998), pp.
236–257 (this collection is discussed in note 47).
"The Elizabethan Printer and Dramatic Manuscripts," Library 4th ser. 12 (Dec.
1931): 253–275, repr. in Ronald Brunlees McKerrow: A Selection of His Essays,
comp. John Phil-
lip Immroth, Great Bibliographers Series, No. 1
(Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1974),
pp. 139–158, quotation
from p. 146 of the reprint; McKerrow distilled this text (an address to
the Bibliographical Society) from his series of Sandars lectures
delivered at Cambridge Univer-
sity in 1928, which were first
published as edited by Carlo M. Bajetta in Studies in
Bibliography
53 (2000): 1–66. In the Bajetta edition of the lectures, an
expansive, illuminating discussion on
the "common causes of errors in
printed books" begins on p. 48.
"Texts of Documents and Texts of Works" was first published as "Literary
Editing"
in Literary & Historical Editing,
ed. George L. Vogt and John Bush Jones (Lawrence: Univ. of
Kansas
Libraries, 1981), pp. 35–56. The original title was assigned to the
author as his topic at
the "Conference on Literary and Historical
Editing," held at the University of Kansas in 1978;
Tanselle later
criticized the title of the conference and the topic titles as "misguided in
sug-
gesting that the nature of editing shifts at disciplinary
boundaries" ("Historicism and Critical
Editing," Studies in Bibliography 39 [1986]: 5). When he reprinted the essay
as the prologue to his
collection Textual Criticism
and Scholarly Editing (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia for
the
Bibliographical Society of the Univ. of Virginia, 1990), pp.
3–23, he adjusted the title to reflect
his own views. In the
essay he argued that labeling a work "literary" or "historical" is an
artifice
which ought not bear on how it is edited; he continued by
identifying the distinction between
private papers and works intended
for publication as having genuine editorial significance for
editors
in every discipline.
Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. This subject is also
discussed in many
of the essays Tanselle reprinted in his collection
Literature and Artifacts (see note 42), especially
"Textual Criticism and Deconstruction" (pp. 203–235); others
include "Libraries, Museums,
and Reading" (pp. 3–23) and
"Enumerative Bibliography and the Physical Book" (pp. 186–
199). Indeed, as the title of the collection emphasizes, the relationship
between literary works
and their artifactual representations is a
unifying theme, an aspect of which is pursued in almost
every essay (a
point widely missed in a review appearing in Text 14
[2002], which attempted
to criticize the book as themeless). In 2004
Literature and Artifacts was brought out in a
superb
Italian translation made by the late Luigi Crocetti
(1929–2007), distinguished former librarian
of the Biblioteca
nazionale centrale di Firenze and Italian translator of the Dewey Decimal
Classification System (Letteratura e manufatti,
introduzione di Neil Harris [Firenze: Le Lettere]).
Tanselle's
collection evoked an expression of deep appreciation from its eminent
translator: "to
be the translator of such a book has been for me a
privilege: in its field it is [the] finest book I
have ever read"
(Luigi Crocetti to G. Thomas Tanselle, 2 April 2005). Crocetti, who became
director of the restoration department of the Florence library when
the Arno flooded in 1966,
dedicated his translation to the "venerated
memory of Roger Powell" (1896–1990), restorer
of the Book of
Kells and pioneer of the minimal intervention techniques of restoration
whose
efficacies received much confirmation in the aftermath of the
flood.
"Mumpsimus—Sumpsimus," Ciceroniana n.s. 1
(1973): 3–9, repr. in Selected Classical
Papers (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 15–21,
quotation from p. 17 of the
reprint; the title refers to a traditional
story discussed in the next paragraph, but also to "Sex.
Clodius—Sex. Cloelius," the paper in which Shackleton Bailey first
proposed Cloelius (Classical
Quarterly n.s. 10
[1960]: 41–42, repr. in Selected Classical
Papers, pp. 13–14).
The sketch about a rival journalist's famished bay mare originally appeared
in a "San
Francisco Letter" to the Virginia City (Nev.) Territorial Enterprise, published between 16 and 18
January 1866. Though contemporary instances of the spelling "eat"
pronounced as "et" have
been discovered, Mark Twain demonstrably
preferred "et," using it in both Roughing It and
Huckleberry Finn: see Mark Twain's
Writings: San Francisco, 1865–1866, ed. Richard Bucci and
Robert H. Hirst (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, forthcoming
2011).
In a fine appreciation of the philological scholarship of Sebastiano
Timpanaro, Paolo
Mari cited Cesare Segre as the author of this
observation. According to Mari, Segre wrote "il
ricorso sistematico
all'usus scribendi favorisce una ricostruzione del
testo standard, cioè tendente
all'omogeneità; mentre la
fiducia nella
lectio difficilior
apre la strada a eccezioni e trasgressioni"
("systematic
recourse to usus scribendi favors a reconstruction of
the standard text, that is, one
tending toward homogeneity; whereas
faith in
lectio difficilior
opens the way to exceptions and
transgressions") (P. Mari,
"Il contributo di Sebastiano Timpanaro al metodo critico fililogico,"
in Per Sebastiano Timpanaro: Il linguaggio, le passioni,
la storia, a cura di Franco Gallo, Giovanni
Iorio Giannoli e
Paolo Quintili [Milano: Edizioni Unicopli, 2003], p. 53 n. 68). For
lectio
difficilior, Timpanaro
stressed Giorgio Pasquali's warning to scholars that the concept of dif-
ficulty must be understood historically: "facile e difficile non sono
termine assoluti, e quel che
è difficile, cioè
inconsuetò, per noi, può essere stato facile per uomini di
altre età" (quotation
from Pasquali, Storia
della tradizione e critica del testo, 2nd ed. [1952; Firenze: Le
Monnier, repr.
Firenze: Le Lettere, 1988, 2003], p. 123; for
Timpanaro's remark, see The Genesis of Lachmann's
Method [cited in note 39], p. 137).
|
III
Studies in bibliography | |