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What is Authorial
Philology?
Paola ItalIa, GIulIa RabonI, et al.
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Paola ItalIa, GIulIa RabonI, et al.
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What is Authorial Philology?
A stark departure from tradional philology, What is Authorial Philology? is
the rst comprehensive treatment of authorial philology as a discipline in its
own right. It provides readers with an excellent introducon to the theory
and pracce of eding ‘authorial texts’ alongside an exploraon of authorial
philology in its cultural and conceptual architecture. The originality and
disncon of this work lies in its clear systemazaon of a discipline whose
autonomous status has only recently been recognised.
This pioneering volume oers both a methodical set of instrucons on how
to read crical edions, and a wide range of praccal examples, expanding
upon the conceptual and methodological apparatus laid out in the rst two
chapters. By presenng a thorough account of the historical and theorecal
framework through which authorial philology developed, Paola Italia, Giulia
Raboni and their co-authors successfully reconceptualize the authorial text as
an ever-changing organism, subject to alteraon and modicaon.
What is Authorial Philology? will be of great didacc value to students and
researchers alike, providing readers with a fuller understanding of the raonale
behind dierent eding pracces, and addressing both tradional and newer
methods such as the use of the digital medium and its implicaons. Spanning
the whole Italian tradion from Petrarch to Carlo Emilio Gadda, and with
examples from key works of European literature, this ground-breaking volume
provokes us to consider important quesons concerning a text’s dynamism,
the extent to which an author is ‘agenve’, and, most crucially, about the very
nature of what we read.
As with all Open Book publicaons, this enre book is available to read for free on the
publisher’s website. Printed and digital edions, together with supplementary digital
material, can also be found at www.openbookpublishers.com
Cover Image: Ludovico Ariosto, Frammen autogra dell’Orlando furioso, c. 26r, Ferrara, Biblioteca
Comunale Ariostea, Classe I A. Cover Design by Anna Ga.
ItalIa, RabonI, et al. What Is authoRIal PhIloloGy?
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3. Italian Examples
Paola Italia and Giulia Raboni1
3.1 Petrarch: The Codice degli abbozzi
Petrarch’s Canzoniere, also known as Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, is the
earliest Italian work of which we have the original manuscript, which is
partly autograph and partly idiograph (i.e., written by Petrarch’s copyist
under the author’s direct supervision).
Codex Vatican Latin 3195 preserves the nal redaction on which
the poet worked until his death, but at the same time contains traces
of multiple redactions in authorial interventions on the manuscript
itself. Along with this fundamental document (now available online:
https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.lat.3195), we also possess other
manuscripts (and their copies) that were derived from 3195 with the
intention of making a gift to someone or simply meant for circulation.
These copies represent intermediate forms in the elaboration of the Rerum
vulgarium fragmenta. The three most important codices — Chigiano
(written by Giovanni Boccaccio), Laurenziano 17 (a copy
of a lost codex donated to the Lord of Rimini Pandolfo II Malatesta)
and Queriniano (a copy of another lost manuscript made for an
unknown recipient) — were used to reconstruct the elaboration of the
text in specic moments in time. As for the content of the lost intermediate
redactions, this was reconstructed indirectly, through the testimony of
letters and derived manuscripts, as well as through comparison with
the extant manuscripts. Among these redactions, the most important
is the so-called ‘Pre-Chigi’ or ‘Correggio’-form (from the name of the
recipient, the Lord of Parma Azzo da Correggio) that represents the rst
and central phase in the construction of the Canzoniere’s narrative.
1 Paola Italia wrote sections 3.5, 3.6 and Giulia Raboni wrote sections 3.1-3.4.
© Paola Italia and Giulia Raboni, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0224.03
72 What is Authorial Philology?
Thanks to the sum of these testimonies, it was possible for modern
scholars, beginning with Ernst Hatch Wilkins’s studies in the 1950s (see
Wilkins 1951), to analyze how the structure of Petrarch’s work evolved.
Wilkins identied nine forms (whose hierarchy was re-discussed by
later scholarship), which allow us to connect the codex’s structure, and
the factors determining its internal cohesion, with specic variants in
the individual poems. Wilkins justied this analysis partly on account
of internal reasons and partly on account of their relationship with the
rest of the poems.
Examining the individual variants of a single text can indeed reveal
the internal motivations of its evolution, but their implications may
remain unclear if their relationship (be it one of similarity or opposition)
with the other poems is not also analyzed. It is precisely because of this
need for broader analysis that much of the scholarship on variants in the
Canzoniere is not focused on single texts but on groups of texts, whose
genetic apparatuses sometimes reveal a tormented creative activity
aimed at making the collection more coherent and at redistributing
organically its contents and themes. The problem with giving a unitary
representation of Vatican Latin 3195 using an apparatus of variants is
therefore complex. One reason for this is that, while it is possible to
create an apparatus for a single text, the text’s position and function in
the wider work may vary between dierent redactions of the Canzoniere,
and this kind of representation might not do justice to the variants that
are due to structural reasons. As a result, Petrarchan philology has in
recent years explored two parallel paths. On the one hand, there has
been a growth in studies about the constitution of the Canzoniere as a
whole (see especially the work of Domenico De Robertis, Cesare Segre
and Marco Santagata), its chronology, changes in the disposition of the
texts, and new interpretations of its macro-structures; and on the other,
multiple photographical and critical editions of the main witnesses have
been produced.
Of particular interest among the Petrarchan codices is the autograph
manuscript Vatican Latin 3196 (also available online: https://digi.
vatlib.it/mss/detail/Vat.lat.3196) , which was already the object, as we
have noted (see Chapter 1), of a ground-breaking edition by Federico
Ubaldini (1652), who had rendered the variants using advanced
typographical solutions, such as using a smaller print and italics for the
73
3. Italian Examples
rejected variants and a larger print for the denitive text. This edition,
reprinted in 1750 and still employed by the eighteenth-century scholar
Ludovico Antonio Muratori in his Petrarchan commentary, was used
by scholars until Appel’s 1891 diplomatic edition (which was in turn
replaced by Romanò’s 1955 edition). Laura Paolino’s critical edition
(Petrarca 2000) represents a fundamental advancement in our capacity
to fully appreciate the readings found in the manuscript. Paolino devotes
much space, in the introductory chapters, to the history of Petrarch’s
autographs, providing a reconstruction that also represents a signicant
contribution to the history of Petrarchan philology and of petrarchismo
over the centuries. Her introductory chapters give a comparable amount
of attention to the detailed description of the material characteristics
of the manuscripts, as well as to discussing the criteria adopted in her
edition (these are extremely conservative, and quite close to being
diplomatic, extending even to the poet’s graphical use, and they are
justied by the peculiar nature of the object itself of the edition).
Paolino’s edition also reconstructs the chronological order of the
manuscript’s leaves, allowing us to isolate signicant moments in the
elaboration, the earliest one being the group composed of fols 7–10,
11r, 15r, 16, datable to 1336–1337/8. Recent studies suggest that the rst
project of the narrative structure of the collection is to be dated to these
same years, although this was signicantly dierent from the denitive
structure (Pancheri 2007). A peculiarity of this codex, which justies the
particular treatment it has received, as we will see, is that it is composite,
i.e., containing leaves belonging to multiple moments in time. The codex
includes, together with seventy-three poems — four of which are by
correspondents of Petrarch, others in double or lacunose redactions — ,
two fragments of the Triumphus Cupidinis and of the Triumphus
Aeternitatis, and one of Fam. 6. Because of its composite nature,
neither the order of the texts, nor the individual readings correspond
to a single stage of the composition. The situation is made even more
problematic by the fact that there may be later authorial interventions
that cannot always be dated with certainty. In addition to this, in some
instances, the texts are from a period later than the intermediate forms
of the Canzoniere that we possess.
Adopting the usual praxis of authorial philology, namely, that of
choosing as copy-text the nal authorial intervention that the codex
74 What is Authorial Philology?
presents, would have led to privileging the most advanced state, which
is not the same for every text in the codex, and is often closer to the
other codices of the Canzoniere. Had this approach been adopted, the
process of authorial re-elaboration would have been less noticeable.
Paolino instead reproduces the oldest text as the copy-text and allows
the reader to reconstruct the subsequent interventions from the
apparatus, where they are dated on the basis of evidence of varying
kinds, graphical (ductus, ink), topographical (the position of the variant
in the manuscript), or chronological (in the case of marginalia where
the date is reported).
Paolino justies her ‘heterodox’ choice with two arguments, one
‘internal’ and the other ‘external’. The rst one is the authority of
Domenico De Robertis, who chose the earliest redaction as copy-text
when editing Leopardi’s Canti, and therefore opted for an evolutionary
apparatus, dierently from Moroncini and his successors who instead
opted for the author’s last will. This is actually a bit of a forced
parallelism, as Leopardi’s Canti exist in multiple printed forms, and
De Robertis’s criteria, based on the meaningfulness of the rst printed
edition for the author and the public alike (see section 3.5), cannot be
applied to Petrarch’s private drafts, which were in no way ‘denitive’
and were never meant to be seen by the public. The second argument
is more convincing: most texts are clean transcriptions, and the variants
they present are not ‘instaurative’ (i.e., introducing new content to the
text) but rather ‘substitutive’ (i.e., modifying an already stable form
of the text). In cases of ‘live’ elaboration (variants applied during the
process of the rst writing, aecting the text that follows), Paolino uses
a dierent form of representation by including the eaced passage
in italics directly in the copy-text, before the version that replaces it.
Consider an example in the following sonnet, https://digi.vatlib.it/mss/
detail/Vat.lat.3196, c. 5v (the apparatus of the original Italian edition
was translated by us):
36 [150]
c.5v 1 Che fai, Alma? che pe(n)si? aurem mai pace?
2 Aurem mai tregua? od aurem guerra et(er)na?
3 Che a di noi? che dir? p(er) quel ch’io scerna,
75
3. Italian Examples
4 A’ suoi begli occhi il mal nostro no(n) piace.
5 Che pro, se co(n) quelli occhi ella ne face
6 Ghiaccio di state (et) foco qua(n)do iuerna?
7 Ella no(n), ma quel dio che gli gouern[a].
8 Questo ch’è a noi, s’ella sel uede, et tace?
A 9 Tace talor la li(n)gua, e ‘l cor sospira
10 E co(n) la uista asciutta i(n) duol si bagna
11 Dentro doue mirando altri nol uede.
9 Talor tace la li(n)gua, e ‘l cor si lagna
10 Ad alta uoce, e ‘n uista asciutta (et) lieta,
11 Pia(n)ge doue mira(n)do altri nol uede.
12 P(e)r tutto ciò la mente no(n) s’acqueta,
13 Né ro(m)pe il duol che ‘n lei s’aghiaccia (et) stagna,
14 Ch’a gran sp(er)a(n)ça huom misero no(n) crede.
3. che dir p(er) > no(n) ‘l so ma in: correction written in left margin and referred
with a cross-reference mark to the eaced text. 6. Ghiaccio di state (et)> di state
vn [g]hiaccio (Ghiaccio eaced, (et) crossed out and the words vn [g]hiaccio un
written above, between the lines; the g- of [g]hiaccio is hidden by an inkblot) 7.
Quel dio > coluj A 10. i(n) preceded by an eaced letter, perhaps n; redaction A
is erased by three oblique lines 13. Né ro(m)pe > ro(m)pendo; s’aghiaccia >
s’accoglie (above the line)
1. Above the sonnet, left: tr(anscriptus)
A particular problem is that of variants made illegible by later
interventions (such as heavy erasures). In this case the editor is forced
to integrate the later variant in the text despite it being extremely likely
to belong to a later phase — not unlike the variants that the author
wrote in the margins or the interline, that are instead relegated to the
apparatus, as they represent a later revision of the text than that found
76 What is Authorial Philology?
in the copy-text. See for example the rst quatrain of sonnet 7 [191].
https://digi.vatlib.it/mss/detail/Vat.lat.3196, c.1v:
1 Sicome eterna uita è ueder dio,
2 Né più si brama, né bramar più lice,
3 Così me, do(n)na, il uoi ueder, felice
A4Questo breue (et) fugace uiuer mio.
4 Fa in q(ue)sto breue (et) fraile uiuer mio.
In this case, as the apparatus explains, ‘me’ on line 3 was written over an
erasure, under which Angelo Romanò (Petrarca 1955) had deciphered a
‘fa’ — a reading that is grammatically well-coordinated with redaction
A of line 4, in a construction later superceded by the complete rewriting
of the nal line of the quatrain. Because of the way the text is presented
in Paolino’s edition, this is not immediately clear to the reader.
It is therefore evident that an optimal solution cannot always be
found. Choices often entail gains as well as losses and risks, so all
factors must be taken into consideration in order to make the solution
as compliant to one’s theoretical objectives as possible. Other than
the advantages and the minor problems that we have discussed, one
can also argue that Paolino’s edition could ideally be integrated into
a progressive apparatus of the whole Canzoniere, where the earliest
version will necessarily have to be picked as copy-text.
Paolino also edited the Codice degli abbozzi (before the proper critical
edition was published) in Mondadori’s Meridiani series (Petrarca 1996)
as the second volume of Petrarch’s rhymes, where, despite presenting
essentially the same text and most of the apparatus of the critical
edition, the spelling and punctuation have been notably modernized. In
this way, Paolino oers us an example of an astute double edition of an
autograph directed to dierent audiences.
3.2 Pietro Bembo: The Prose della volgar lingua
The rst direct reference to the fact that Pietro Bembo was working on
a dialogue on the vernacular language dates to April 1512, in a letter to
Trifon Gabriele which was also directed to his other Venetian friends and
77
3. Italian Examples
primarily to Giovanni Battista Ramusio. In this letter, Bembo announces
that he is going to send his friends two books (‘and perhaps half the
work’), asking for proofreading and suggestions on the revision of the
text. However, there are no extant witnesses of this rst redaction or of
the discussions that followed. Similarly, although in a letter sent in 1525
to Cardinal Federigo Fregoso Bembo claims that there exists an earlier
version of the dialogue dating to when he was at the Urbino court (after
1507), this is not proved by any extant document.
Bembo’s statement must be taken with a grain of salt, as it was part
of a strategy to claim the precedence of his work over the rst Italian
grammar to be printed, Francesco Fortunio’s Regole della volgar lingua
(1516); Bembo’s dialogue itself also implicitly declares its own priority,
given that it is set in 1502 and mentions Giuliano de’ Medici (d. 1517)
as alive. It is, however, also true that indirect traces might suggest the
existence of at least a work of planning and grammatical classication
at a quite early date. For not only is there a testimony by Lodovico
Castelvetro documenting the circulation of the text before 1508 and an
allusion by Bembo himself to some ‘annotations on language’ he had
written in a letter to Maria Savorgnan in September 1500, but there are
also still stronger hints in the so-called ‘B Fascicle’ added to the edition
of Petrarch’ Canzoniere printed by Aldo Manuzio, which Bembo curated
(1501), which contains grammatical notes that re-appear in an almost
identical form in the Prose (better known with the less accurate title
Prose della volgar lingua; see Patota 1997), thereby proving the continuity
of Bembo’s project of linguistic reform since the time of the Manuzio
editions of Dante and Petrarch.
By the time he sends the fascicle to his Venetian friends, Bembo has
already been present for a few months in Rome at the court of Pope
Leo X, who would later, in March 1513, take him as his secretary. It
is likely that this role, together with his irritation for the existence of
Fortunio’s aforementioned Regole (which also implied the necessity to
update his work), and the particular complexity of the third book of the
dialogue (which is essentially a grammar of literary Italian language in
dialogue form) kept him for some time from completing the work. It is
nevertheless true that the Prose is not mentioned again until the letter
to Fregoso of January 1525, where he says that he has already given
a manuscript copy of the text to Clement VII in November 1524, and
78 What is Authorial Philology?
claims that he intends to publish it in Venice. Since Clement’s copy is
now lost, the Prose’s extant witnesses are limited to the three printed
editions (Tacuino 1525, Marcolino 1538 and the posthumous Torrentino
1549, edited by Carlo Gualteruzzi) and the autograph Vatican Latin
3210 (known as V), preserved at the Vatican Library and composed
in 1521–1522, at a time when Bembo, dissatised with the papal court,
had retired to his villa in Padua, devoting himself to the cultivation of
literary pursuits. On account of the importance of the dialogue in the
Italian literary tradition, all of these redactions have lately been the
object of a particular attention, allowing us to closely follow the process
of their elaboration.
The most important recent contributions are those on the stop-press
corrections of the Torrentino 1549 edition (discussed rst by Bongrani
(1982) and more recently closely analyzed by Sorella (2008)), which
has allowed us to identify interventions made by Benedetto Varchi
meant to normalize the text’s language, even going in some cases
against Bembo’s own precepts. This will lead in the long run to a critical
edition of the nal text innovating on Dionisotti and Martelli’s current
‘vulgate’ editions. The earliest redaction of the text has also received
special attention, giving new insights into the times and processes of
its composition, with two critical editions, one centred on manuscript V
and another on the princeps, respectively produced by Mirko Tavosanis
(Bembo 2002) and Claudio Vela (Bembo 2001).
Despite being based on the same witnesses, these two editions are
radically dierent not only because both authors had to take into account
the existence of the other’s work (Vela, despite having published his one
year before Tavosanis, does cite Tavosanis’s 1996 PhD thesis), but also
because of a partially dierent critical approach.
Tavosanis’s editon is indeed focused on the sources employed by
Bembo, specically the manuscripts that he used to exemplify and dene
his vernacular grammar, including the medieval lyric chansonniers,
Dante’s poems and Boccaccio’s works, specically the Decameron, for
which Tavosanis proves that the Hamilton autograph was used. The
adoption of this ‘critical focus’ obviously did not prevent Tavosanis from
discussing the dating of V and its relationship with the princeps, and
often but not always his ndings t with Vela’s conclusions. However,
such an approach led Tavosanis to privilege the manuscript’s earliest
79
3. Italian Examples
redaction (which he calls ‘phase A’), relegating to the apparatus both
the genesis (on the rst part of the apparatus) and the text’s following
evolutions as found in later interventions on the manuscript, as well as
in the Tacuino print (P) (on the second part).
The key advantage of this structure is that it isolates the earliest
redaction from Bembo’s later interventions on the manuscript, which
were meant, on the one hand, to add more examples, especially in the
third book, and, on the other, to normalize the text itself to his own
grammatical rules, which were not originally applied systematically
and might have been fully elaborated only at a later stage, as can be seen
from the evolutionary apparatus. What the apparatus cannot instead
attest is the dierence between V’s nal redaction and P, a dierence
that is at times quite considerable, and which suggests the existence of
a copy of V with corrections, probably lost precisely because of its use
by the printer. The evolutionary part of the apparatus does not indeed
distinguish V’s later reading from P, just as it does not represent the
genesis of the interventions on the manuscript; instead, this part of the
apparatus substantially limits itself to two moments of the elaboration,
that of base reading and that of the princeps, thereby making the
apparatus extremely easy to read.
The critical edition produced by Vela is more complex, but also more
analytical and exhaustive, and it is based on two fundamental choices.
First, the 1525 princeps was selected as the copy-text. Despite not being
the author’s nal will, the princeps indeed represents the point of arrival
for the ‘imposition across Italy of a language learned on books, which
only in the most cultured environments overlaps to some extent with
everyday language, but is nevertheless spoken and written as though
it was a living language’ (Dionisotti 1966: 47), a linguistic norm
adopted by the new literature which ultimately replaces the form of
Italian cultivated in the courtly tradition that precedes it. Furthermore,
the adoption of P as copy-text also allowed for the use of extremely
conservative criteria in the text’s linguistic and graphic usage, extending
as far as the use of punctuation and accents, and thereby underlining
the importance of Bembo’s choices in dening linguistic norms in all
these domains, as well as highlighting the Tacuino edition’s pursuit
of elegance, which is symptomatic of the treatise’s ‘noble’ implied
readership. As far as representation is concerned, the identication of
80 What is Authorial Philology?
a specic phenomenology of correction both for the later interventions
on V and for the passage from V to P has led, in this edition, to an
unprecedented ‘dialogue’ between text and apparatus, one in which
much information, rather than being delegated to the apparatus, can
be inferred from the text thanks to the use of particular indicators that
allow instant visualization of the various phases by which the text has
been elaborated according to the following analytical representation:
1. Editorial strata in V
a) when V’s nal reading coincides with P and is the result of a process
of an internal correction of V, the segment is signalled in the text by two
interpuncts (·text·), and the genesis can be found in the rst part of the
apparatus;
b) when in V a segment is erased without being replaced by anything,
this is signalled by a single interpunct (·) in the text, and the deleted
content can be found in the apparatus between > and <;
c) if instead the segment is erased without being replaced, but it is
rewritten in a substantially identical form elsewhere in V, the same
symbol is used in the text, while the apparatus will report the erased
text between ↑↑> and <↑↑ or ↓↓> and <↓↓, depending on whether the new
collocation, indicated in brackets, is before or after in the text;
d) a passage which was originally written in a substantially identical
form but was collocated elsewhere in V (in other words: what we have
called ‘the new collocation’ at 1c) will be delimitated in the copy-text
by ↓↓ or ↑↑ depending on whether the original collocation was before
or after the new one, with the rst band of the apparatus reporting the
original collocation (see par. 28 of the example reported below);
e) text added while revising V is isolated by two asterisks (with smaller
asterisks indicating further additions); in the case of longer additions
that are adjacent, or are one within the other, superscript letters are
instead used (in bold if the addition happened on extra leaves that were
physically added).
81
3. Italian Examples
2. Passage from V to P
a) P’s additions are signalled by two superscript ‘P’ letters at the
beginning and end of the section in the text (PtextP);
b) where P suppresses a segment that was in V’s nal reading, this
is signalled by in the text, with the second band of the apparatus
reporting the removed section;
c) segments that changed their collocation from V’s nal reading to P
are marked out by two single downwards or upwards arrows in the text
(↓text↓ or ↑text↑), with the original collocation given in the second band
of the apparatus;
d) if P’s reading is dierent from V, it is underlined in the text: the
manuscript’s nal reading is in the second band of the apparatus;
e) purely paragraphematic or minor graphic variants are in a third band
of the apparatus at the bottom of the page, written in a smaller font.
3. P’s errors
a) when the correction appears in the print’s Errata corrige, the text will
incorporate the correction, with the segment being marked out by two
superscript E’s (EtextE), and the substituted text can be found in the
third band, which is marked by [E];
b) where Vela has corrected the text, this is not reported in the text itself,
and can instead be found in the table of P’s corrected readings at the end
of the volume.
The three-band apparatus thus reports, where applicable, the segments
as follows: 1. a), b), c), d) in the rst band; 2. b), c), d) in the second
band, e) at the bottom of the second band; 3. a) in the ‘E-band’.
Here is, as an example, the passage corresponding to – (pp.
28–29 in the Vela edition):
24+Et come che il dire paia dal latino esser detto: egli non
è così; percioche quando questa voce alcuna vocale dinanzi da se ha,
·· *le più volte*: et non Hispagna si dice. + 25Il-qual uso tanto
innanzi procedette; che anchora in molte di quelle voci, le-quali
82 What is Authorial Philology?
comunalmente ·parlandosi· hanno la . dinanzi la detta .. ·quella ..
pure nella .. si cangiò· bene spesso. , , et somiglianti.
26Oltra che alla voce ·s’aggiunse· non solamente la .. ma la .
anchora, et ·fecesene· ; *non mutandovisi percio il sentimento
di lei in parte alcuna: 27il-quale in quest’altra voce ·· ·si muta nel
contrario di quello della primiera sua voce; che nel latino solamente è ad
usanza: la-qual voce nondimeno · Italiana è più tosto, si come dal Latino
tolta; che Thoscana. * 28↑↑Ne solamente molte voci, come si vede; o pure
alquanti modi del dire presero dalla Provenza i Thoscani.↑↑a|29Anzi essi
anchora ·molte gure· del ·parlare·, molte sentenze, molti argomenti
di Canzoni, molti versi medesimi le furarono: et piu ne furaron quelli;
che maggiori stati sono et miglior poeti riputati. 30Il che agevolmente
vedera; chiunque le Provenzali rime pigliera fatica di leggere: senza che
io; a cui sovenire di ciascuno essempio non puo: tutti e tre PvoiP gravi
hora recitandolevi. 31Per le-quali cose *quello* estimar si ·puo·; che io
M. Hercole rispondendo vi dissi; che il verseggiare et rimare da quella
natione, piu che da altra s’è preso.
24 +… +] transcribed in the last charta. In the nal text the corresponding text is
added in margin and is elaborated as: >Spag<
25 >favellandosi< parlandosi>essi< quella .. pure nella .. °si ins.
cangiò (from cangiarono with -ò over -a- and >rono<)
26 >si giunse< s’aggiunsefecesene] -se- ins.
27 ] - over –>et peraventura in altro< si
muta>voce< Italiana
28 ↑↑…↑↑] cf. x, apparatus of §§ 36–38
29 molte (e over i) >modi et< gure>dire< parlare written above
31 puo rewritten istimar
_________________
24 ] : .
24 detto;cosi:volte,Hispagna,dice:
26 . Non27 Latino30 Ilche31 Perlequalialtra,
83
3. Italian Examples
This structure has the advantage of being highly analytical and compact,
and the understanding of its complex system of signs is also helped by
the inclusion of an extremely useful bookmark containing the legend
of the symbols. However, it is only useful for a text such as this one, in
which most interventions are additions, and it would not t cases in
which the witnesses bear very dierent redactions or the elaboration of
the single witnesses is more convoluted.
Likewise, it is evident that such an ‘invasive’ structuring is justied
by its critical function, and the text is nonetheless usable, after removing
the symbols, for an edition aimed at a broad public.
3.3 Tasso: The Rime d’amore
The editorial history of Torquato Tasso’s works is connected to a sort of
legend, one particularly nurtured in the Romantic age as in, for example,
Goethe’s eponymous tragedy, and generated by the dramatic, true-life
vicissitudes of the poet, who was locked up in the Sant’Anna asylum in
Ferrara for having allegedly attempted to assault with a knife a servant
at the court of the Duke. Probably, behind his imprisonment there lurks
too the suspicion aroused by the poet’s restless behaviour towards
religion, which was particularly inconvenient in Duke Alfonso II Este’s
court, as his duchy was under the constant threat of being annexed to
the Papal state, and this made the Duke particularly zealous in dealing
with any suspicion of heresy.
The news of the poet’s madness aroused during his lifetime an
immediate and morbid interest for his texts, which began circulating
in editions that were mostly derived from his autographs, which the
publishers obtained from the poet himself. Tasso himself indeed
encouraged these editions in the hope that his fame might win him
freedom, although afterwards he was very dissatised with their hasty
and slapdash editorial choices which involved including apocryphal
texts and adopting incoherent or contaminated readings.
The poet’s conned and deprived living conditions also had their
consequences on the times and modes of his production. On the one
hand, the need for protection abnormally nourished his creativity,
especially for encomiastic poetry; and, on the other, Tasso nds himself
forced to work on the manuscript leaves and the printed editions to
84 What is Authorial Philology?
which he has access, and this makes it even more dicult to reconstruct
the ways in which his work was composed and revised in the years of
his seclusion. In this period, Tasso also organizes his poetry according to
a tripartite structure divided into love rhymes, encomiastic rhymes and holy
rhymes, with the holy rhymes also including encomiastic poems sent to
members of the clergy. This three-fold division represents an attempt to
move beyond the Petrarchan ‘unitarian’ model of the Canzoniere towards
a more ‘parcelled out’ mode of organization which would become
particularly popular among the poets of the Baroque age.
The project only found partial realization with the publishing of the
Parte prima (containing the love poetry) in 1591 by Francesco Osanna in
Mantua, and that of the encomiastic rhymes by Pietro Maria Marchetti
in Brescia in 1593. As for the third part, it was destined to remain
unpublished, and its intended outline has been recently reconstructed
by Luigi Poma on the basis of the manuscript Vatican Latin 10980,
copied by Marcantonio Foppa from a holograph, and edited in 2006
by Franco Gavazzeni and Vercingetorige Martignone. Before this
edition, the situation was muddled and almost unsolvable because
of the arbitrariness of the printed editions that the author could not
personally supervise. Tasso’s often overly dramatic declarations on the
situation also led many scholars to consider a reliable reconstruction
of these texts impossible. This is evident in the rst edition with
some scholarly ambitions, produced at the beginning of the twentieth
century by Angelo Solerti (Tasso 1902), which contains 1708 texts but
admittedly gives up on reconstructing the author’s will, even ignoring
some undeniably authorial attempts at systematization, and instead
employing a chronological order reconstructed on the basis of the poet’s
biography. What Solerti keeps of Tasso’s project is only the thematic
tripartition, albeit redistributing its contents and signicantly altering
its form by changing the order of the poems and also including ones
that the author later excluded, especially the madrigals. In this way
Solerti eaced Tasso’s design, regardless of the fact that this can be
reconstructed through the short expositions that he wrote for each of
the published poems in line with this aim of giving both a narrative and
exegesis to his own poems. Tasso’s texts are further altered in Solerti’s
edition by the contamination of individual readings from dierent
85
3. Italian Examples
redactions, and worsened by the choice to only include in the apparatus
the readings that the editor deemed meaningful.
Despite the undeniable merit of being the rst edition to list the
manuscripts and give them a siglum, Solerti’s edition is unsatisfying for
modern philologists. All the same, Solerti’s work was, for a long time, the
basis of both scholarly editions and editions for a general public, as well
as for critical works on Tasso. For this reason, many scholars ended up
ignoring Tasso in works that deal with more technical aspects of poetic
practice and that require a solid philological basis, as Valeria de Maldé
(1999) noticed in commenting upon Aldo Menichetti’s monumental
monograph on Italian poetic metres.
A rst rigorous examination of the problem of editing Tasso’s Rime
came in Lanfranco Caretti’s Studi sulle Rime del Tasso, a collection of
essays published in 1950. After having analyzed in detail the history
of the poems and having classied the main manuscripts and printed
editions, Caretti reviewed Solerti’s edition in detail, underlined its
shortcomings, and proposed a systematization based on the author’s
nal will. Thus, Caretti claimed that in editing the poems, the Osanna
edition had to be used for the rst part, the Marchetti edition for the
second and the codex Ravelli of the Angelo Mai library in Bergamo for
the third part, as Caretti considers it the witness closest to the author’s
nal will for the holy rhymes. Rhymes excluded from this authorial
systematization had to be placed in a separate section instead. The
entire previous process of correction would have to be represented as
well, including the rst authorial attempts to structure the collection
as attested by the autographs. These guidelines were used for multiple
researches promoted by Caretti himself at the University of Pavia and
now form the basis for the National Edition of Tasso’s works. We thus
now know — as already mentioned — which manuscript, namely,
Vatican Latin 10980, contains the most advanced version of the third
part. Dierent forms for the second part have been identied as well:
one is found in the manuscript F1 of the communal library of Ferrara
and in the Parisian codex Pt, while another, earlier, systematization
(which will soon be published) has been found in manuscripts E1 and
E2 at the Biblioteca Estense in Modena.
The most important contribution on the love lyrics instead came from
Dante Isella’s studies (collected in 2009a: 51–114). What makes Isella’s
86 What is Authorial Philology?
work innovative is not so much the way he pinpoints the importance of
the autograph Chigiano 302, known as C and datable to 1583–1584
(which contains the earliest systematization of the love lyrics and was
already known to earlier scholars), but rather the fact that he claried
how it was composed, leading him to theorise a new edition, dierent
from the one Caretti imagined. Isella indeed proved the direct derivation
of the readings found in the Chigiano from two annotated prints: Ts1
(an exemplar of the Prima parte delle rime published by Vittorio Baldini
in 1582, known with the siglum 11), and Ts2 (an exemplar of the Terza
parte, published by Vasalini in 1583, also known as 22), both published in
Ferrara and both harshly criticized by the poet despite his involvement
in their production. The derivation proposed by Isella demonstrates
how, although one should always use them with some circumspection,
these editions actually contain heretofore unattested redactions. When
re-elaborating his texts, the poet, deprived of his own autographs, found
himself forced to use these editions, somewhat ‘authorizing’ them
regardless of their reliability.
The detailed analysis of the genesis of the Chigiano manuscript also
underlines the originality of the collection it contains. This autograph
has an individual character, based on the revision of the printed texts,
but altered to make the collection as a whole more coherent. Such a
character is signicantly dierent from that of the collection ultimately
published in the Osanna edition. From this dierence came Isella’s
proposal to subdivide further this theoretical edition so as to present both
systematizations. The apparatus of this ideal edition would therefore
have to represent the respective genesis of each of the two dierent
copy-texts, while the earliest attempt at an authorial systematization,
dating to 1567 and known as silloge degli Eterei, would go in an appendix.
The reason for this is that this version precedes the thematic subdivision
and is therefore radically dierent from both later forms in terms of
structure (see Gavazzeni 2003). As in Caretti, a separate volume would
then contain all poems that do not belong to any of the collections.
The 1993 edition of the Rime d’amore (secondo il cod. Chigiano 302)
by Gavazzeni, Leva and Martignone therefore presents, in accordance
to this plan, the rhymes of the collection with the nal readings as the
copy-text and an apparatus divided in three bands (see the example)
containing:
87
3. Italian Examples
‒ a rst band with the internal evolution of the manuscript;
‒ a second band with the readings of the printed editions known
as and and the two annotated exemplars, where used
(with the addition, for a few poems, of the testimony of later
prints);
‒ a third band with extra observations (for instance, material
details of the manuscript).
The apparatus, placed at the bottom of the page, is linear and somewhat
‘photographic’, as the varia lectio found in the printed editions and
annotated exemplars is separate from that belonging to the Chigiano.
The apparatus clearly divides the two phases of the work, but requires
the reader to look at both bands in order to get a conspectus of the
whole; at the same time, the part dedicated to the manuscript is rich
with topographical indications (using superscript letters) where the
authors deemed such information relevant to dening the manuscript’s
chronology, but again requiring the reader to make his deductions
(Gavazzeni himself would later prefer other ways of presenting the varia
lectio, see his edition of Leopardi’s Canti in section 3.5). Here is how
sonnet of the Chigiano appears in the edition:
c. 13r
Appressandosi a la sua donna, dice a’ suoi pensieri et a’ suoi aanni che si partano da
lui.
Fuggite, egre mie cure, miei aspri martiri,
Sotto il cui peso giacque oppresso il core,
Ché per albergo hor mi destina Amore
Di nova speme e di più bei desiri. 4
Sapete pur che quando avien ch’io miri
Gli occhi inammati di celeste ardore,
Non sostenete voi l’alto splendore
Né ‘l ammeggiar di que’ cortesi giri, 8
Ma ve ‘n fuggite qual notturno e fosco
Stormo d’Augelli inanzi al dì che torna
88 What is Authorial Philology?
A rischiarar questa terrena chiostra. 11
E già, s’a certi segni il ver conosco,
Vicino è il sol che le mie notti aggiorna,
E veggio Amor che me l’addita e mostra. 14
2 mia] >lo< 4 Di nova speme di più beia] >A le sue gioie, a’ suoi dolci<
5 pura] >ben<
11 (, 3)
Ts1 (lines 2, 5, 6a, 6b, 8, 9)
Arg. Appressandosi … lui] Sonetto nel ritorno2 il cui peso] ‘l cui >pondo<
3 mi] lo4 Di nova … bei] A le sue gioie, a’ suoi dolci 5 pur] >ben< /
quando] quand’6 Gli occhi inammati] >Que’ Soli accesi<□I lumi accesi 8
que’] >duo<9 ve ‘n] >via< 13 il] ‘l
In this example, only the rst two bands can be found (the second
one being divided, as we will see, in two parts). In the rst band, the
angled brackets (><) indicate an eaced passage, while the superscript
letters indicate the position of a correction (in the example, a stands for
a correction found in the interline above).
The second band is divided in two parts: the rst part contains, in
bold, the indication of the print witnesses: in this case, the poem can
be found in 11 (the aforementioned 1582 edition printed by Vittorio
Baldini) and in Ts1, an exemplar of 11 annotated by Tasso himself.
The brackets following the sigla contain, for 11, the volume and page
containing the text (, 3), and for Ts1 the list of the lines that the author
altered in this exemplar (2, 5, 6a, 6b, 8, 9); the line number is in italics
if the correction makes the line coincide with the one in the copy-
text: when this happens, the text of the correction is omitted from the
second band of the apparatus, as it can easily be read in the copy-text.
In the second part of the second band, the forward slash (/) at line 5
separates two corrections belonging to the same line, while the square
□ at line 8 separates two subsequent interventions on the same portion
of text.
89
3. Italian Examples
The critical edition of the Osanna version, carried out by Vania de
Maldé (Tasso 2016), allows us to better understand the process of Tasso’s
elaboration, both in terms of narrative and of form, as already shown
by Colussi 2011 which examines the Chigiano’s evolution from the
points of view of syntax, phono-morphology, lexis and rhetorical style.
Colussi’s study enriches and conrms our perception of the importance
of the collection in Tasso’s development of a new poetic, and shows how
it diers from the one of his youth in two dierent ways: the progressive
abandonment of the poetic model oered by Giovanni Della Casa (this
is indicated by the way Tasso limits enjambements, that is, Della Casa’s
most signature stylistic feature) and the pursuit of a ‘middle’ lyric style,
eliminating the more popular elements (as evident from the removal
of the madrigals) but at the same time reducing the gravitas, which
becomes conned instead to his heroic poem Gerusalemme liberata.
3.4 Alessandro Manzoni:
Fermo e Lucia and the seconda minuta
The beginning of Manzoni’s long work on his novel (I promessi sposi)
can be dated with precision to 24 April 1821, thanks to a note written by
the author on the rst sheet of the initial chapter of the earliest draft of
the work (conventionally called Fermo e Lucia after the main characters).
After having written poems, plays and essays, Manzoni attempted a
novel. In doing so, he at the same time addressed both the complaint
made by contemporary romantics about the absence of the novel as
a genre in the Italian high culture tradition and the call of the pre-
unitarian nationalist movement for a national language that might assist
the realization of cultural unication. The work was composed over two
years, and reached its conclusion in September 1823 in a form where,
while the narrative is mostly complete, the linguistic problem — that
is, which of the vernacular languages, employed both in the past and
present, in Italy to use — is consciously ignored for the moment. We
know, however, from a letter to Claude Fauriel that Manzoni was aware
of this issue and already convinced of the need to nd a solution.
The only form of national language that existed in Manzoni’s
time was the hyper-literary language of lyric poetry. This begged the
question regarding which language one should adopt in writing a novel
90 What is Authorial Philology?
that strived to be popular (both in terms of public and of narrative)
and understandable for the entirety of the nation. After having been
set aside, the linguistic problem re-emerged once the rst draft was
complete, when the author started revising his text to prepare a
manuscript for which a copyist would make a fair copy so as to send it to
the censor. After correcting a few chapters, roughly until the end of the
rst volume, Manzoni seems to be increasingly convinced that he was
able surpass the language of that rough draft, one he himself denes as
‘an indigestible mixture made of sentences that are part Lombard, part
Tuscan, part French, and even part Latin, as well as of sentences not
belonging to any of these groups but rather derived through analogy
and extension from one or the other’.
By gaining experience from the process of writing itself and from
reading Tuscan works and dictionaries, as well as perhaps through
discussions with his friends, Manzoni soon grew convinced that he
could reach a less ‘subjective’ unitary language, based on chiey
comic Tuscan authors and the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca,
a dictionary characterized by a heavy linguistic conservativism. After
a few chapters had been revised on the same paper as the rst draft
(Manzoni had intentionally only used one vertical half of the page in
order to leave the other half for corrections), and after the copyist had
transcribed them in fair copy, Manzoni began a much deeper revision
which would in the long run lead to the rst print of the Promessi sposi,
produced in Milan by Vincenzo Ferrario in instalments from 1824 to
1827. Since the beginning of this revision in spring 1824, the new text
progressively distances itself from the earlier drafts, not only because it
is done on other leaves of paper, but also because the narrative is entirely
restructured, with many episodes being shortened and the ‘montage’ of
the events being altered. Whereas in the earlier version the adventures
of the two separated lovers were told separately (rst everything that
happens to Lucia, and then the vicissitudes aecting Fermo), in the later
form the episodes are ‘interlaced’, leading to what amounts to an almost
complete rewriting of the novel. From the documentary point of view,
these are the witnesses from the rst draft to the Ferrario edition:
‒ Prima minuta (‘rst draft’): the autograph dossier of Fermo e
Lucia, which survives in its entirety with the exception of a few
leaves. The leaves are numbered on the rst page and folded
91
3. Italian Examples
vertically so as to use the right column for the text and the left
one for corrections;
‒ Seconda minuta (‘second draft’): the autograph of the revised
version, which for the earlier chapters reuses some leaves from
the Prima minuta;
‒ Censor’s copy: drafted by the copyist, it contains interventions,
some quite major, by Manzoni dating to the period before it
was sent to the censor and the printer;
‒ Printing proof: only a few extant pages;
‒ The 1824–1827 print (known as the Ventisettana): two stop-
press corrections were found by Neil Harris and Emanuela
Sartorelli (2016) only on two of the sixty-eight examined
exemplars, while the analysis of the watermarks indicates that
fteen pages were replaced during the long print of the three
volumes.
All these autographs can now be directly consulted online on the
website www.alessandromanzoni.org, a database that collects all the
manuscripts conserved in the Braidense Library of Milan and the books
of the writer, together with their description and the critical bibliography
on Manzoni’s works.
Due to the rst draft’s structural dierence from the Ventisettana, the
editors had to publish it separately from the manuscript versions, as
Chiari and Ghisalberti (Manzoni 1954) already did when rst editing
the full work as part of the ‘Classici Mondadori’ series. This edition,
while accurate and commendable, is not exhaustive and is unsystematic
in the presentation of the variants that are relegated to notes at the
end of the book. The 2006 edition directed by Dante Isella attempts to
address this issue, by adopting more accurate and ecient criteria for
the representation.
First of all, the apparatus, which is too extensive to t in the footer, is
in a separate volume, written in the same font size as the text to facilitate
the comparison and underline its importance. In this way, the reader is
able to appreciate the phases of the correction over the longest textual
segments possible. In other words, where there are multiple corrections
over a single segment, the interventions are presented in a systemic
92 What is Authorial Philology?
apparatus which attempts to highlight the ‘direction’ of the corrections
as a whole rather than indicate where each individual correction is
found on the manuscript page — a choice that comes with the risks
implied in such a bold interpretative eort.
See this example of the apparatus, from vol. 1, chapter 1, f. 5a,
paragraph 20 (see Fig. 6):
20 [osservando come aveva fatto tante altre volte] sul monte i riessi del sole
già nascosto, ma che mandava ancora la sua luce sulle alture, distendendo
sulle rupi e sui massi sporgenti come larghi strati di porpora.
5a 20 sul monte … porpora] (reading 1 and part of 2 are on f.4d) 1i
massi sporgenti e le rupi sporgenti illuminate adagli ultimi raggi del sole b(above) dai
rie<ssi> che riettevano quà e là → 2sui massi e sulle rupi sporgenti al< > bil
sole già tramontato cil sole già nascosto aper chi bai suoi occhi, e la luce sparsa quà e là
come a grandi strati di porpora dla luce eil riesso del so<le> i riessi del sole già
nascosto, ma che 3sull’alto del monte i riessi del sole già nascosto, ma che
splendeva ancora mandava ancora la sua luce sulle alture, distendendo sulle
rupi e sui massi sporgenti come larghi strati di porpora. → T
The evolution of this segment is schematized in three phases
(corresponding to the superscript numbers 1 2 3): the second phase
materially reuses elements of the rst (hence the use of the symbol →),
while the nal one, which is the copy-text (here indicated as T), partially
reuses the third phase (the process is therefore represented as → T).
There is no reusage of materials from phase 2 to 3, as the absence of arrows
signals: this means that Manzoni completely eaced the sentence he had
written in phase 2 and rewrote it from scratch (phase 3), then altered
it to the form found in the copy-text. Where there are more evolutions
internal to a single phase, this is represented with superscript letters, rst
in roman, then in italic and, where there is a further development, this
is marked in bold. The nal formulation for each phase is in the regular
font size, while the ‘accidents’, that is, minor changes within a phase,
are in smaller print, so that the nal reading for each phase is always
immediately evident. Topographical indications are minimal: the arrow
signals reuse of materials, but the way this happens (whether the new
material is inserted in an empty space or written above or below, etc.) is
95
3. Italian Examples
not specied unless it holds chronological signicance (i.e., it suggests
that an individual intervention is from a later time compared to the rest
of the segment). This solution clearly obliges the editor to determine
what to consider an autonomous phase and what not, and to attribute
each correction a relative chronology.
From the chronological point of view, the greatest diculty stems
from the re-use of leaves from the rst draft in the second, which
requires the distinction of the readings belonging to the second draft
from those of the rst so as not to confuse two dierent moments in
the elaborative process. While this distinction can be made on the basis
of graphical usage, language, and content, it is impossible to make
with absolute certainty. In uncertain cases, a footer is added to both
the text and the apparatus, with the uncertain reading preceded by a
bicuspid arrow (↔), thereby signifying that the reading might belong
to either form, while the copy-text reports the earlier reading. In the text,
these uncertain readings are signalled by superscript numbers. See for
instance vol. , chapter , leaf 26c (Fig. ), where the description of the
lawyer’s oce is eaced during the revision and completely rewritten in
the left-hand column only after a rst attempt at reusing the rst version
as attested by an aborted correction (un] una above). Two variants are
instead uncertain (and these are numbered 7 and 8, implying that six
other uncertain variants precede in that same chapter), as they might
belong to the genesis of the second draft as much as to the revision of
Fermo e Lucia. Here is the text and apparatus relative to leaf 26c:
venite gliuolo, e lo fece entrare con se nello studio. Era questa una stanza
con un grande scaale di libri vecchj e polverosi, un tavolo gremito di
allegazioni, di suppliche, di papiri7, e intorno tre o quattro seggiole, e da
un lato un seggiolone a bracciuoli con un appoggio quadrato coperto di
évacchetta inchiodatavi8 con grosse borchie, alcune delle quali cadute da gran
tempo lasciavano in libertà gli angoli della copertura, che s’incartocciava quà
e là. Il dottore era in veste da camera, cioè coperto d’una lurida toga che gli
aveva servito molti anni addietro per perorare nei giorni di apparato, quando
andava a Milano per qualche gran causa. Chiuse la porta e rincorò Fermo con
queste parole: Figliuolo, ditemi il vostro caso.
↔ 7libelli 8vacchetta
96 What is Authorial Philology?
26c 21 venite] before (on f. 26b) addio22 libri vecchj] libri written over v<
>gremito di] before ripieno die da un lato … bracciuoli] 1a bracci<uoli>
2T {e] over i}23 gli aveva] gli ins.apparato, quando] from apparato =
quan<do> perchè bisogna rincorò] r- on d
↔ 22 papiri] libelli above vacchetta inchiodatavi] corr. to vacchetta
The problem of representing the later steps in the elaboration of the
novel is even more complex. Unlike what happens between the two
drafts, in the passage from the Seconda minuta to the Ferrario editon
(that is the Ventisettana) the narrative remains almost identical. As
a result, it would be theoretically possible to edit the Ventisettana by
putting the Seconda minuta’s readings in the apparatus. However, the
Seconda minuta underwent an extensive work of internal revision, with
entire pages being rewritten or eliminated, so that a single apparatus
would be illegible. It was therefore decided to edit the Seconda minuta
autonomously (Manzoni 2012), while the edition of the Ventisettana
only reports in the apparatus the changes that happened between the
Seconda minuta’s nal reading and the Ventisettana’s reading (through the
censor’s copy and, when available, the printing proof). The apparatus
follows the same rules as that of the Fermo, while the paragraph division
is that established by Caretti in his 1971 edition of the Ventisettana
(Manzoni 1971) and still adopted by most later editors, so as to make
the comparison easier.
Of course, particular attention was paid to the re-used leaves from
Fermo. They are signalled by a grey background, and in the cases
where Manzoni had originally attempted a correction of the text from
the Fermo but then decided to rewrite the entire passage instead, the
apparatus indicates the corresponding paragraph of the Fermo, marking
any case of a dubious reading with a bicuspid arrow. This solution is
not without some issues. The main one is that the Seconda minuta is a
work in progress and not a complete, organic text. Manzoni actually
worked at the same time at rewriting the text from the Fermo and at
printing the already-rewritten parts, so that, in short, we cannot read
the second tome of the Seconda minuta as continuous with the rst one,
since between these parts there is the entire work on the censor’s copy
and the replacement of some of the already-printed leaves with new,
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3. Italian Examples
revised ones (which Manzoni used to call ‘cartons’). The decision made,
then, was taken both to prevent the apparatus from becoming unwieldy
and to underline the most critical moment of Manzoni’s linguistic
elaboration from the mixture of languages found in Fermo to the ever-
more Tuscan-centric solution of the following versions. In this way, the
edition proposes itself as a tool to reconstruct the process that brought
the text to its nal version through much more complex steps than was
previously recognized.
This edition constitutes perhaps one of the most advanced solutions
so far from the point of view of interpretation, leaving aside photographic
representation in favour of a diachronic structure that allows for the
comparison of long segments, with recourse to appendixes only when
the elaboration is too complex to be represented in the apparatus.
This is nowadays a common tendency in authorial philology and it
undoubtedly has many advantages, especially for prose texts, since it
allows us to see the evolution of variants in its totality even in terms
of syntax and style; this approach does not, however, come without
disadvantages, especially from the linguistic point of view. Indeed, if
on the one hand, the organization of the apparatus in phases makes
it easier to perceive the evolution of a segment, it is actually harder,
on the other hand, to notice the substitution of single words, which
would aid lexicological and morphological research. If one made this
kind of objection, one could answer that: 1) often the replacement of
a word is the consequence of changes in the wider structure; 2) in the
case of the systematic application of a linguistic norm, the replacement
is likely to also happen in isolation (that is, it is not always within a
wider re-worked segment) and can be immediately noticeable; 3) it is
true that comparing single words is more dicult in this way, but the
lexical change is nevertheless registered by the apparatus, while one
could not pinpoint major changes from a word-for-word apparatus
without having to look at the autograph; 4) one can always nd a way
to give representation to single variants while privileging the phase of
the correction.
98 What is Authorial Philology?
3.5 Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti
The importance of Giacomo Leopardi’s collection of poetry, the Canti,
lies not only in their being a fundamental poetic work of the rst half
of the nineteenth century, but also in their particular editorial history,
which will be worth retracing here before speaking about the technical
problems connected with their multiple critical editions. The Canti are
in fact the only case in Italian literature where four critical editions have
followed one another, with each featuring a dierent structure. This
case also deserves a longer discussion compared to the previous ones,
because the history of authorial philology begins with Moroncini’s
1927 critical edition, which, by highlighting the extraordinary writerly
dynamics of Leopardi’s texts, helped to inspire Contini in founding
criticism of variants.
Even leaving aside the editions, the history itself of the Canti,
with their long and often non-linear evolution, justies the particular
philological attention they have received. The relevant witnesses are:
‒ The rst edition of the two patriotic canzoni ‘All’Italia’ and
‘Sopra il monumento di Dante’, printed in Rome in 1818 (R18);
‒ The ‘Ode ad Angelo Mai’, printed in Bologna in 1820 (B20);
‒ The rst collection, Canzoni, printed in Bologna in 1824
accompanied by the Annotazioni (‘Commentary’) (B24);
‒ The collection Versi, printed in Bologna in 1826 (B26);
‒ The rst proper edition of Canti, printed in Florence in 1831
(F31);
‒ Another edition of the Canti, printed in Naples in 1835 (N35),
with its errata corrige (N35err);
‒ An exemplar of N35 with the addition of the author’s
corrections, in part autograph and in part written under his
dictation by his friend Antonio Ranieri (Starita corretta or
N35c).
One must also add other intermediary stages, namely the publications
of one or more poems in journals, such as the Nuovo ricoglitore,
which between 1825 and 1826 hosted the author’s earliest idylls and
re-published the aforementioned Annotazioni as well as the poem ‘Alla
99
3. Italian Examples
sua donna’ (these editions are known as NR25 and NR26). A similar
case is that of the 1825 publication of the idyll ‘Il sogno’ on the journal
Il Caè di Petronio (CP). The chronological series of the main witnesses
therefore is R18, B20, B24, NR25–26, B26, F31, N35, N35c.
As well as the printed editions, multiple autographs survive. In
analysing them, one must however take into consideration that they
are not drafts, but rather revised fair copies (Gavazzeni 2006: 409),
which contain corrections in the interline, in margins, or occasionally on
separate slips of paper physically added to the page. For the rst three
canzoni (‘All’Italia’, ‘Sopra il monumento di Dante’, ‘Ad Angelo Mai’),
Leopardi sometimes adds variants to the printed versions, while for the
others they can only be found in manuscripts. The marginal space of the
manuscripts is also used for the varia lectio (the sum of ‘genetic variants,
alternative readings, glosses and lists of synonyms meant to “authorize”
the language’, ibid.). The varia lectio therefore does not only include
proper variants (be they genetic or alternative), but also footnotes which
are functional to the text and at times pre-exist parts of it, even though
they cannot be properly considered part of the text itself of the poems.
One such case is provided by the linguistic glosses (sometimes in the
added slips), indications of sources, authorial commentaries, and other
elements that should be represented separately from genetic, alternative
and evolutionary variants. Therefore, the analysis of how the text was
formalized leads the critic to understand more fully the layers of its
elaboration, and ultimately the compositional strategy lying behind it
and the authorial poetics inspiring it.
Starting with the canzone ‘Bruto minore’, Leopardi becomes his
own copyist, writing a stanza per page while lling the lower, left, and
(rarely) right margins with the varia lectio, surrounding the text in a way
that is visually reminiscent of classical and humanistic commentaries.
The varia lectio is especially used in B24. This is perhaps due to the
young poet’s need to justify to himself and to the literary world a series
of linguistic choices, which were often perceived as heterodox, despite
being rooted in the Italian canonical literary tradition. In the manuscripts
written after the Canzoni, such as those containing the ‘Epistola al conte
Carlo Pepoli’, ‘Il Risorgimento’, and ‘A Silvia’, there are fewer variants,
and these are always reported on the left or right margins. For ‘Le
ricordanze’, ‘La quiete dopo la tempesta’, ‘Il Sabato del villaggio’, ‘Canto
100 What is Authorial Philology?
notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia’, the situation changes, and ‘the
variants are included between round brackets in the text (in the case
of ‘Le ricordanze’ there are also square brackets indicating rejection)’
(Gavazzeni 2006: 410). By examining the manuscripts, the modus
operandi of the poet can be reconstructed. As Gavazzeni puts it (ibid.:
410–11):
After having copied what at the time he considered the nal reading,
Leopardi continues copying from that same source — a now-lost dossier
from which he transcribed the provisionally nal text together with its
genetic materials and alternative readings. These genetic variants and
alternative readings, together with other materials, were included in
the varia lectio that the author used for interlinear corrections and, more
rarely, for changes to prints following the princeps. From this, one can
deduce that normally Leopardi would rst transcribe the text, then
report the variants in the footer (or occasionally in the lateral margins or
the header), and then started altering his base-text.
Let us therefore start our examination of the critical editions with
Moroncini’s (Leopardi 1927), which Folena called, in the 1978 reprint,
‘a happy encounter of knowledgeable empiricism and dogged
scrupulousness’ (Leopardi 1978: n.p.). As for the copy-text, Moroncini
(later followed by Peruzzi and Gavazzeni in their editions) opts to
reproduce the texts and order of the Starita corretta (N3c), the printed
edition with corrections written under Leopardi’s dictation, considering
this as representative of the author’s nal will. The apparatus is vertical
and covers the manuscript and printed tradition without distinction.
Invariants are given in square brackets, variants in italics (though this
can be confusing since Leopardi himself largely employed italics in his
manuscripts), and the nal text is in bold. Variants are separated by
single spacing when in a single witness, while they are double spaced
when more than one witness is noted. Moroncini also distinguishes
substantial from interpunctive variants by putting them in two dierent
bands of the apparatus. The authorial varia lectio is reproduced in
smaller print and included in a box in the lower margin of the page;
when the text is abbreviated or incomplete, the editor completes the
word or sentence himself.
Innovative and scientic in its way of representing the manuscripts,
especially for that time, the Moroncini edition was also strongly
101
3. Italian Examples
interpretative in transcribing and in ordering the variants. Nevertheless,
it remained essential for more than half a century, being the basis on
which all studies on the Canti were built for a considerable period.
The critical edition that followed, curated by Emilio Peruzzi and
published in 1981, had the merit of printing for the rst time the
facsimiles of all of the poet’s manuscripts together with the critical
edition itself (though Peruzzi’s edition does not include notes, prefaces
and dedications). In this way, the 1981 edition allowed the reader to
double-check the philologist’s work for every text. Despite agreeing
with Moroncini on the importance of using the author’s nal will (the
Starita corretta) as copy-text and on presenting together manuscript
and printed tradition, Peruzzi diers from his predecessor on two
fundamental points. First, he does not separate interpunctive and formal
variants from the substantial ones on the grounds that ‘often a comma is
enough to change the meaning of a sentence, and even more so in poetry,
where punctuation also denes pauses, scans the rhythm, and traces
the melodic curve, bringing about specic meanings’ (Leopardi 1981:
vi). Moreover, Peruzzi’s transcription of the variants is signicantly less
interpretative, compared to Moroncini who used to ‘develop hemistichs
or even entire lines from single words’ (ibid.) without signalling such
integrations in the apparatus. The representation of the variants is based
on the same principles as Moroncini’s, as they are put in a column, with
each phase occupying a dierent typographic line. Peruzzi, however,
reports the nal readings of each verse in the header of each page and
gives their genesis below, with Greek letters indicating dierent phases
of a single witness. If a line remains unchanged from the rst version
to the nal one, the line is given with the specication of the earliest
witness, without any other indication. N35’s nal readings are repeated
only where there have been elaborations, as the point of arrival of a
chain of variants. When the reading of a witness does not change in the
following witnesses, the sigla of the following ones are not reported,
thereby implying the identity of the readings.
Greek letters indicate the dierent phases of the elaboration of a
line in a specic redaction. This of course only applies for manuscripts
that may present dierent phases of elaboration: AR (the autographs
preserved in Recanati), AN (the ones at the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio
Emanuele in Naples), AV (preserved in Visso, near Recanati). Eaced
102 What is Authorial Philology?
portions of the text are reported between square brackets, and italics
indicate invariant portions, unlike most apparatuses, where italics either
indicate text that is underlined in the original or eacement. Words
that are underlined in the autograph or in italics in the printed edition
are rendered using small capitals, while upper-case italic indicates a
double underlining. There is a similar ‘switch’ of signs in the case of
words that Leopardi wrote in brackets, which are rendered in double
square brackets, because single brackets are already used for erasures.
Incomplete letters are indicated by a dot below each letter, while an X
with a dot below it indicates an unreadable character. Peruzzi’s edition,
which was reprinted in a less costly version in 1998, is still widely used
by scholars, but its main shortcoming is the limitation of the vertical
apparatus (which presents variants line by line) to represent corrections
that aect more than one line, as often happens in Leopardi’s elaboration
(see the example at section 2.6 of this volume).
As its very title suggests, the Edizione critica delle stampe e dei manoscritti
(Critical edition of the prints and manuscripts), the critical edition
produced by Domenico De Robertis in 1984, is completely dierent for
its way of representing variants and the solutions adopted. De Robertis
indeed separates the manuscript tradition from the prints, editing the
printed editions in the rst volume and publishing very high-quality
reproductions of the manuscripts in the second. The real innovation lies,
however, in De Robertis’s choice of the rst printed edition as copy-text for
each poem, with the apparatus containing the entirety of its evolution
until its latest printed version in N35. For instance, the Ode ad Angelo
Mai is published according to the rst print (B20), while the apparatus
presents the evolutionary variants of the printed tradition: B24, B26, F31,
N35. If the reading of a printed edition is based on the manuscripts AR or
AN, it is signalled in a separate apparatus of footnotes with superscript
letters. The text is in the upper half of the page, and the apparatus in the
lower one. For each witness, all the variants are given, in columns, with
the number of the line to which the variant refers.
The edition, as already noted, does not represent the genesis of
the autographs. This is both for practical and theoretical reasons.
For, according to De Robertis, not only would such a representation
‘require an extremely rened editorial technique, whose costs are at the
moment unaordable’ (Leopardi 1984: xxii), but as editor he wanted
103
3. Italian Examples
to underline — rather than the genetic process — the ‘crystallization’ of
the poem, ‘the moment […] in which the poetic endeavour, no matter
how complex, has reached a fully-dened aspect, and the text breaks
free of the author’s control, at least until the following reprint’ (ibid.:
xxi). The reader is therefore presented with the entirety of Leopardi’s
manuscripts, which are considered autonomous and not in need of an
apparatus. Nevertheless, the philologist adds, in the introductions to
the reproductions of each manuscript in the second volume, a useful
comparative apparatus so as to show that manuscript’s nal reading
and the printed edition to which it is connected.
De Robertis’s edition presents itself as ‘a new methodological
hypothesis, based on a dierent philology and aiming for a dierent
way of representing the text so as to obtain full legibility both for the text
and its history, in order to organically present to the “user” the moment
of “production”’ (ibid.: xvii). To use the author’s own metaphor, the
‘history of the text’s vicissitudes is privileged over its nal form, so that,
rather than the ultimate plot (Starita), the reader can appreciate its long
and complex fabula’ (ibid.: xviii).
A dierent solution is instead found in the new critical edition
directed by Gavazzeni and published in 2006 by the Accademia della
Crusca (with the addition, in the 2009 reprint, of a third volume of
Poesie disperse). The Gavazzeni edition uses, like those by Moroncini
and Peruzzi, the author’s nal will as copy-text (N35c), but follows De
Robertis in the choice of recognizing the importance and individuality
of the two elaborative moments (manuscripts vs printed editions) of the
text, without nevertheless giving up on representing the manuscripts’
genesis. The result is an edition that presents the nal reading of the
Canti, and documents its genesis by reconstructing its manuscript and
printed tradition, but also separately represents, as a tool for scholars,
the most advanced manuscript reading. This is particularly useful
(perhaps necessary) for particularly complex manuscripts such as those
connected to B24, for which the full transcription of the manuscript and
printed variants would have made the study of the autographs more
dicult. We are able to see the manuscript’s nal reading with the
possibility of analysing the phases of the corrections thanks to the integral
reproduction of the text means that one can distinguish chronologically
interventions, dierent inks and the textual stratication. This is very
clear in the example of La Ricordanza, reproduced in Figure 5.
104 What is Authorial Philology?
This is not strictu senso a second critical edition, but rather a tool for
scholars to be read together with the nal print, to which it is connected
by the comparative apparatus. The manuscript’s nal reading, if dierent
from the rst print, is presented in round brackets in N35c’s apparatus.
This ‘bridges’ the gap between the two texts and apparatuses, allowing
us to retrace the author’s intervention in the passage from manuscript to
princeps. Isolating the manuscript text also allows an evaluation of how
much of it survives in the printed editions (the manuscript variants that
are used in the printed text are in bold).
Let us look at the two (both genetic) apparatuses from up close. The
apparatus for the manuscripts is horizontal and explicit, and represents
all corrections on the manuscript in relation to the nal reading, which
is the one found in the copy-text. The collocation on the page and the
chronological ordering of each variant are specied in italics. Depending
on the kind of correction, these variants might be presented derivatively
(X over Y, X written below Y etc.), or progressively (1X from which 2Y from
which T, or simply X from which T). In the case of minor corrections, it is
more ‘agile’ to represent the correction derivatively: X written above Y.
Where there are instead wider corrections, or variants in complex
order, the progression is more useful than the derivation (1X from which
2Y from which T or X from which T) so as to make the process clearer. Minor
corrections within a phase, as already seen in the previous chapters, are
better represented derivatively, so as not to obscure the understanding
of the longer segment.
The apparatus pertaining to the manuscripts is therefore always
diachronic and not synchronic, as the chronological order of the variants
is privileged over their position in the text (unless the position gives
information relevant to chronology), obliging those who want to know
where a correction can be found on the manuscript page to check the
manuscripts themselves. It is also a systemic apparatus, as the portion of
text aected by the variant (the one before the square bracket) is always
directly comparable with the variant itself and re-written entirely in the
apparatus. In this way, the reader can see it immediately without having
to go back to the text. The apparatus of the prints is positive for the
variants, negative for the invariants. The presence of a reading preceded
by the siglum B26, for instance, implies that all testimonies older than
B26 report the reading that precedes, while all the later ones have
105
3. Italian Examples
the same reading as B26, unless another siglum informs us that from
another edition onwards the reading changes again. The last siglum
indicates the rst print to present the nal reading. The prints whose
sigla are omitted because of this solution can be found on the top left
corner of every page, which for each poem lists in chronological order
all the prints that contain it.
The varia lectio is instead isolated in a box (like in Moroncini’s
edition) and transcribed with absolute delity to the autograph, down
to its position in the page and its graphic peculiarities. The number of
the line to which the varia lectio refers in the text is indicated within
brackets and in bold, preceding the portion of text itself. To make critical
study of the text easier, dierent typographic characteristics correspond
to dierent kinds of varia lectio. Thus, for instance, a grey background
indicates self-commentaries and linguistic sources, so as not to confuse
them with alternative variants.
AN c. [1r] (p.1)AV c. [4r] (p.7)
La Ricordanza
Idillio
1 O graziosa Luna, io mi rammento
2 Che, or volge un anno, io sopra questo poggio
3 Venia carco d’angoscia a rimirarti:
4 E tu pendevi allor su quella selva
5 Siccome or fai, che tutta la rischiari.
6 Ma nebuloso e tremulo dal pianto
7 Che mi sorgea sul ciglio, a le mie luci
8 Il tuo volto apparia; chè travagliosa
9 Era mia vita: ed è, nè cangia stile,
10 O mia diletta Luna. E pur mi giova
11 La ricordanza, e ‘l noverar l’etate
12 Del mio dolore. Oh come grato occorre
13 Il sovvenir de le passate cose
14 Ancor che triste, e ancor che il pianto duri!
________
106 What is Authorial Philology?
title La Ricordanza | Idillio ] AN 1Idillio | La Luna from which2Idillio |
La Luna o la Ricordanza from which3Idillio | La Ricordanza (in pen
B, with L on I)
1 O] AV from Oh
2 Che, or volge un anno,] AN 1Ch’or volge un anno, (with an on al) from
which 2Ch’è presso a un anno, from which T (in pen C)Che, or] AV
Ch’or from which T sopra] AN from su (see Philological Notes)
4 su quella selva] AN 1sopra quel prato, (with prato rewritten on bosco)
2su quella selva, from which T (in pen C).
5 Siccome or] AN written above Com’ora (in pen C)
7–8 a le mie luci | Il tuo volto apparia; chè travagliosa] AN 1a le (before
al<le>) mie luci | Il tuo viso appariva, perchè dolente from which 2il tuo
bel viso | Al mio sguardo appariva, perchè dolente 3a le mie luci | Il tuo
volto apparia; che travagliosa (in pen B) from which T (in pen C)
9 cangia] AN 1cangia 2cambia (in pen B, written above 1) from which T (in
pen C)
11 ricordanza] AN from rimembranza
12 come] AN written above quanto (in pen B)
13 de le] AV from delle
14 triste] AN from tristiil] AN from ‘l (in pen C)
AN c. [1r]
right margin, transversal
(12) (come sì grato) (in pen C)
(AV) NR26 B26 F31 N35 (N35err) N35c
ALLA LUNA.
1 O graziosa luna, io mi rammento
2 Che, or volge l’anno, sovra questo colle
3 Io venia pien d’angoscia a rimirarti:
4 E tu pendevi allor su quella selva
107
3. Italian Examples
5 Siccome or fai, che tutta la rischiari.
6 Ma neuboloso e tremulo dal pianto
7 Che mi sorgea sul ciglio, alle mie luci
8 Il tuo volto apparia, che travagliosa
9 Era mia vita: ed è, nè cangia stile,
10 O mia diletta luna. E pur mi giova
11 La ricordanza, e il noverar l’etate
12 Del mio dolore. Oh come grato occorre
13 Nel tempo giovanil, quando ancor lungo
14 La speme e breve ha la memoria il corso,
15 Il rimembrar delle passate cose,
16 Ancor che triste, e che l’aanno duri!
title | ALLA LUNA.] NR26 LA RICORDANZA. | Idillio .B26 LA
RICORDANZA|IDILLIO F31 XIII. | ALLA LUNA.N35
1 luna] NR26 LunaF31
2 l’anno, sovra questo colle] NR26 un anno, io sopra questo
poggioF31 l’anno, io sovra questo colleN35
3 Io venia pien] NR26 Venia carcoN35 Venia pienoN35err
7 alle] NR26 a leN35
8 apparia, che] NR26 apparia; chèN35
10 luna] NR26 LunaF31
11 il] NR26 ‘lN35
13–17 Nel tempo … duri!] (AV Il sovvenir … duri!)NR26 Il sovvenir …
duri!B26 Il sovvenir … duri.N35c
(15) rimembrar] NR26 sovvenirN35c delle]NR26 de leN35
cose,]NR26 coseB26
(16) e che l’aanno duri!] NR26 ancor che il pianto duri!B26 ancor che
il pianto duri.N35c
3.6. Carlo Emilio Gadda’s work
What has been called the ‘Gadda case’ has dominated twentieth-
century Italian philology. This has been due to two main factors. First,
108 What is Authorial Philology?
the particular conditions of his production, one in which only part of
his works were printed, while many others remained unnished. And
second, the writer’s habit of keeping in his ‘legendary vaults’ all the
documentation relating to his literary activity. The publication of all
of Gadda’s works in the ‘Libri della Spiga’ series by Garzanti began in
1988 and nished ve years after. This edition was — as the director
of the series called it — ‘a well-meditated philological proposal’ that
was based on ‘a general project for a critical edition’ (‘Presentazione’
by Dante Isella in Gadda 1988: xviii). Isella and his students published
a rigorously-established text for each work without an apparatus, with
the exception, as we will see, of La meccanica, and this represented the
rst attempt to give an order to a particularly intricate textual situation.
Isella summarized this state of aairs in the introduction to the rst
volume (ibid.: xx):
The rst problem we had to face while organizing this edition was the
aforementioned gap between public and private, i.e., between what
Gadda wrote but kept in his legendary vaults and what he managed
to publish during his tormented and often desperate life. We did not
fear the mixture of completed and unnished works: the ‘non nito’ is
a constitutive, ontological, element of Gadda’s creativity. Nevertheless,
from the outset, it was apparent that it would have been absurd […]
to organize this edition as a strictly chronological succession of edited
and unedited works. Even by distinguishing and grouping separately
dierent genres of texts (as much as possible with a writer for whom
the pastiche is a fundamental feature), it would nevertheless be evident
(and irritating even for the most well-disposed reader) that there is an
inconsistency between the texts that underwent the nal revision and
those that (even after philological scrutiny) remain uid both in terms of
reading and structure.
As curator of a posthumous work whose author had not left a precise
editorial plan, Isella opted for the historical reconstruction of the
authorial project that emerged from the letters the author exchanged in
the mid-1950 with Giulio Einaudi (publisher of Gadda’s masterpiece, La
cognizione del dolore), and particularly that which is contained in the letter
written on 14 December 1954, from which it is possible to deduce that
Gadda wanted to organize his works by separating narrative texts from
essays. Gadda’s proverbial reticence to ‘almost posthumously’ publish
texts written many years before is another reason why Isella did not
109
3. Italian Examples
want, in transmitting Gadda’s work to readers in the new millennium,
to mix the edited works with the rich and extremely important unedited
material (see Italia 2007c; Italia and Pinotti 2008).
It is, however, undeniable that the two characteristics of Gadda’s
work, namely its ‘complex system of communicating vessels’ and its
‘textual metamorphosis’ (Isella in Gadda 1988: xx) over time, have made
it a particularly fertile eld for study and have led to new developments
in authorial philology in general. Beginning in 1983, with the edition of
the Racconto italiano di ignoto del Novecento, a new method of representing
manuscripts was established, distinguishing apparatus, marginalia, and
alternative variants (see sections 2.3–2.4), thereby allowing us to identify
and separately represent multiple textual levels (Isella in Gadda 1983
and in Gadda 1993: 1267–1268). As Isella put it:
This model is based on the double need to represent fully the complexity of
Gadda’s page while at the same time to rationalize its many components,
freeing them from the threads in which they are entangled. It is indeed
rst of all necessary to distinguish the text from the marginalia, the
latter being the series of the writer’s interventions, written in margins
or in the interline of the text proper, that report indications, doubts, self-
commentaries, etc. It is also necessary to distinguish readings that by
succeeding one another constitute the phases of the established (i.e. most
advanced, but not necessarily denitive) text from the readings that
are meant as possible variants (the so-called alternative variants), that
virtually open it up towards new solutions.
This model was the basis for the main critical editions of Gadda’s
texts in the nineties, from the Disegni milanesi (1995) to La meccanica
(published in 1989 in the Opere in a complete edition with apparatus),
to Un fulmine sul 220 (Gadda 2002). These editions were witness to an
important evolution of the apparatus towards an ever more diachronic
and systemic structure.
In fact, the earlier apparatuses, for reasons of clarity and simplicity,
presented each correction by itself regardless of whether it was implied
with others or not, and preferred a synchronic approach in which the
physical characters of the page were preferred over the interpretation of
the chronology of the corrections. The more recent ones instead try to
connect variants that might be related and to present, whenever possible,
their chronological order using superscript numbers that identify the
dierent phases of a single segment.
110 What is Authorial Philology?
We are thus moving from synchronic and photographic apparatuses,
which are useful tools to help read manuscripts, towards diachronic
apparatuses that attempt to put the complex genesis of the text into a
timeline, and from apparatuses containing single variants to systemic
ones that distinguish single phases that include other, appropriately
represented, phases within them. One must also add to the above
the necessity, since the early nineties, to pay more attention to the
reconstruction of how the text is laid out, through the identication
and chronological ordering of the various corrections within the wider
genetic phase (see Italia 2007c, and Italia and Pinotti 2008: 28–34), so
as to overcome the technical and theoretical obstacles that Gadda’s
manuscripts pose (on this, see Terzoli 1993).
If we have gained a better knowledge of the autographs and of the
dierent types of texts (ction, essays, poems), this does not change
our perception of the dynamics of Gadda’s corrections as consisting in
a process of progressive insertions rather than substitutions, with the
result that we nd an ever-growing expansion of an initial segment
with marginal, linear and interlinear additions, as well as with footnotes
or even entire portions written elsewhere and recalled by the use
of marginalia. Such features allow us to engage in deeper study of
manuscripts by representing the dierent series of corrections and
distinguishing immediate and late variants. Real, immediate variants
are limited to those of the rst redaction, on which during one or more
subsequent moments, the author intervened with insertions (i.e., late
variants). In this perspective, it might be useful, in some cases, to change
the point of view from which we look at the genesis of the text by not
taking over the nal reading that the manuscript contains, but rather by
adopting instead the rst complete redaction, the one to which all the
insertions are added later. This solution may not be helpful for unedited
manuscripts, where it is better to choose the nal reading as copy-text,
as we see in the example that is based on the rst draft of the pamphlet
titled Eros e Priapo, which Gadda wrote in 1944–1945 but was only
published in 1967 (see Italia and Pinotti 2008). However, it is a good
solution for manuscript redactions of texts that were later published in
journals and/or in volumes. In these cases, choosing as copy-text the
earliest version which can be reconstructed on the manuscript would
allow one to distinguish easily between immediate and late variants in a
111
3. Italian Examples
two-part apparatus, both genetic and evolutionary, especially when we
consider that the nal reading found in the manuscripts is often almost
identical to that of the rst print.
As a result of these observations, which future editions might
conrm or disprove, the principle of the author’s last will is being put
into discussion in these specic cases. For the printed tradition, this is
relevant because of the importance that the rst editions have (especially
when we look at Gadda as a ‘twentieth-century classic’, with everything
that this implies for his tradition), compared to later or, so to speak,
‘nal’ re-publications. In the case of the manuscripts, this approach
is useful because of the importance of publishing the rst complete
reading (instead of the nal one), i.e., the base-text on which Gadda
developed his pyrotechnical linguistic virtuosity. In this way, the editor
can make the entire process of correcting and of creating variants more
understandable for the reader.
Eros e Priapo
‘A’ Redaction
Chapter
[Ri 18] Dimando interpetrare e perscrutare certi moventi del delinquere
non dichiarati nel comune discorso, le secrete vie della libidine camuata
da papessa onoranda, inorpellata dei nomi della patria, della giustizia,
del dovere, del sacricio: (della pelle degli altri.) Mi propongo vederea ed
esprimere, e non per ambage ma per chiaro latino, ciò che a pena è travisto
e sempre e canonicamente è taciuto ne’ nobili cicalari delle persone da bene:
que’ modi e que’ procedimenti oscuri dell’essere che pertengono alla zona
dell’inconscio, quegli impulsi animali a non dire anim<al>eschi da i’ Plato
topicizzati nell’epiθumetikon cioè nel pacco addominale, nel vaso delle [19]
trippe: i | quali hanno tanta e talora preminente parte nella bieca storia degli
omini, in quella dell’omo individuo, come in quella d’ogni aggregazione
di omini. Non palese o meglio non accetto alla sublime dialessi di alcuni
storici de’ miei stivali, pure un merdoso lezzo redole su dal calderone della
istoria, al rabido al livido, allo spettrale dipanarsi della tesi: dell’antitesi:
della sintesi.b Tesi ladra, antitesi maiala, e ruana sintesi. Che ci ballano la
loro ossitona zoccolante giga d’attorno, d’attorno al sangue, alla vergogna
e al dolore, come le tre streghe shakespeariane da torno la pentola de’ loro
malezî:
112 What is Authorial Philology?
double double toil and trouble:
re, burn and cauldron bubble.
‘Italiani! vi esorto alle istorie’. Tra
le quali ci guazza dimolto dolore e
dimolto sangue, mi pare a me. ‘Vi
esorto alle istorie’.
______________
[Ri 18] interpetrare e perscrutare] 1interp<retare> 2scrutare → Te]
inserted in interline canonicamente] written above regolarmenteimpulsi
animali a non dire animaleschi] 1animaleschi impulsi → T (animaleschi
from animalesche)da i’ Plato topicizzati] che Plato topicizzava → T
cioè] written above ossianel vaso] written under calderone [19] palese
o meglio non accetto] palesi o meglio non accetti → Talla] rewritten
without eacingalcuni] 1alcuni 2taluni 3taluni → Tcalderone] 1tripposo
calderone 2calderone tripposo → Tal rabido al livido, allo spettrale
dipanarsi] 1fra il → lo rabido dipan<arsi> 2allo livido, al rabido, allo (from
al) spettrale dipanarsi → Ttesi: dell’antitesi: della sintesi] from tesi,
dell’antitesi e della sintesial sangue, alla vergogna] al from all< >da
torno] written above dattornopentola] written above pignatta (la pignatta]
before il)dolore e di molto sangue] written above sterco
______________
aannotare
bdi tesi, antitesi, sintesi.