„Blicken wir in die Originalausgabe!“

With his contributions both to textual criticism and editorial methodology, Michael Bernays substantially shaped the field of scholarly editorial practice in the nineteenth century. While his treatise of 1866, Über Kritik und Geschichte des Goetheschen Textes (On the Critical Reception and History of Goethe’s Texts), has come to be recognized as one of ‘foundational’ documents of editorial theory and practice, his 1872 analysis of the gestation and emergence of August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Shakespeare translations (Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schlegelschen Shakespeare – The Creation of Schlegel’s Shakespeare), as well as his conception of a new and revised edition of the Schlegel-Tieck translation (1871–1873, 1892), have both until now attracted very little attention. This article attempts to provide a more precise account of Bernays’ text-critical methodology, and to set his editorial deliberations over the Schlegel-Tieck translation in the broader context of contemporary endeavours to create a ‘German’ Shakespeare.

Komplexe Überlieferungssituationen und Probleme des Autorisationsbegriffs, am Beispiel Goethes

The paper discusses the problems of complex textual transmission, as is typical for the works of Goethe. The method of eclectic editing as practiced by earlier editors was ruled out by the modern concept of ‘authorization’ introduced by Siegfried Scheibe in 1971. The history of the concept of ‘authorization’ shows that Scheibe’s definition of ‘authorization’ is misconstrued on conceptual reasons alone. Besides, it is closely tied to bygone polemical purposes and does not allow complex textual transmission (as in the case of Faust II) to be adequately dealt with. Hans Zeller, by contrast, proposed to reconsider complex textual transmissions and their consequences for editorial theory in 1989. This reconsideration, however, has failed to take place so far. The new Faust edition (2018) proposes an editorial solution to the problem with a non-documentary yet historically specific (i. e. non-eclectic) way of constituting the text. Scheibe’s primary editorial objectives may be better achieved without the concept of authorization which it is proposed should be dropped altogether.

Editorial theory and the range of translations for ‘cedars of Lebanon’ in the Septuagint

Although the Hebrew source text term אֶרֶז [cedar] is translated in the majority of cases as κέδρος [cedar] or its adjective κέδρινος in the Septuagint, there are cases where the following translations and strategies are used: (1) κυπάρισσος [cypress] or the related adjective κυπαρίσσινος, (2) ξύλον [wood, tree] and (3) non-translation and deletion of the source text item. This article focuses on these range of translations. Using a complexity theoretical approach in the context of editorial theory (the new science of exploring texts in their manuscript contexts), this article seeks to provide explanations for the various translation choices (other than κέδρος and κέδρινος). It further aims to determine which cultural values of the translators have influenced those choices and how they shape the metaphorical and symbolic meaning of plants as determined by Biblical Plant Hermeneutics, which has placed the taxonomy of flora on a strong ethnological and ethnobotanical basis.