Abstract
In the process of constructing an academic edition for old and pre-modern texts, although they thoroughly record and comment the phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and lexical variants of a text, its omissions and interpolations, etc., the Romanian philologists tend to deal tacitly with the problem of punctuation, by adding rational, syntactic punctuation, according to the contemporary norm. This method has certain advantages for the general public, but, in fact, falsifies the text, because it puts the actions of a secondary agent—the editor—on the author. Moreover, the lack of perfect archæological relevations of the Romanian old and pre-modern texts—which would show, in this respect, the more or less consequent working habits of our early writers—leads, at least for the moment, to the impossibility of presenting the scientific community with a history of the Romanian punctuation. This is, nevertheless, an idea whose achievement depends on an objective re-evaluation of our contemporary editorial practice.
Highlights
This method has certain advantages for the general public, but, falsifies the text, because it puts the actions of a secondary agent—the editor—on the author
The question if a certain text should undergo the most severe editorial procedures in order to present itself as a scientific edition, or, on the contrary, if it should undergo the editorial procedures toward an ordinary edition is somehow wrong and hurried, ignoring a necessary prior question: if that particular text would contribute to the knowledge of the general public, so that the intervention upon the form of the text might be justified as means of making it more accessible
3-4), and, later on, the reserve of the Romanian editors concerning the drastic principles of the diplomatic editorial model, of François Masai (1950)5 and others, have resulted in the lack of perfect archæological relevations of the Romanian old and pre-modern texts—each of them be the groundwork of a critical edition; or, as an objective corpus—the data for monographies about, e.g., the history of the Romanian punctuation
Summary
This method has certain advantages for the general public, but, falsifies the text, because it puts the actions of a secondary agent—the editor—on the author. It follows that the decision of editing an old text according to certain principles ought to emerge after a profound deliberation upon the gain that might be obtained by the modern reader, and the loss suffered by the text.
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