To Edit a National Poem. The Editing of Kristijonas Donelaitis’s Poem Metai and its Sociocultural Context

Abstract

The poem Metai (The Seasons) by Kristijonas Donelaitis is unanimously recognized as one of the best and most fundamental works of the national canon of Lithuanian literature. The poem’s first edition came out in 1818, almost forty years after the author’s death. Already this edition was characterized by a huge editorial intervention in the authentic text of the work. Since that time, a variegated history of editing the poem’s text began, ranging from romanticized presentation of the text of the work and critical editions in the nineteenth-century German tradition to the building of the national literary canon and very obvious editorial interventions in the text of the twentieth century editions. The editing strategies of the basic editions of the poem were determined by the sociocultural context of that time as well as the type and aims of the concrete edition. Descriptions of the poem Metai as the first or most fundamental work of Lithuanian belles lettres can be supplemented by adding that it is also one of the most intensely edited works in the history of Lithuanian literature.