Prácticas filológicas en la edición de textos del siglo XX: experiencias de un grupo de investigación

In this article, we intend to show how critical editing of texts has changed over time and how philologist-editors have taken different critique, politic and social attitudes in the task of editing texts, taking into account their interests regarding the editorial project to be developed, the idiosyncrasies of the materials that make up the archive corpus, the commitment to the text and the reading that will circulate at another point in our history (literary and dramaturgical), among other aspects arising from the examined textual situations. We briefly discuss editorial theories and methodologies, seeking to show how the ecdotic method was transformed from the 19th to the 21st century, outlining contemporary philological practice in two aspects: platonic (teleological) and pragmatic (sociological) in paper and electronic support. To illustrate and comment on the editorial practice of 20th-century texts, poems, short stories, and above all censored theatrical texts, we bring a synthesis of the work developed within the Institute of Letters from Federal University of Bahia, in the research group that I coordinate, considering the editorial models adopted (digital facsimile, synoptic-critique, interpretive, critique, genetics, critical-genetics, electronic/digital [hypertextual archive or hyperEditing]), according to the critical, philological, genetic and sociological approaches. Also, we consider that critical-philological studies point to a particular theme selected by the philologist for weave comments and criticism.

Digital Resources: Guaman Poma’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno

Recorded in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2007, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615) offers remarkable glimpses into ancient Andean institutions and traditions as well as those of colonialized Andean society in the Spanish viceroyalty of Peru. Housed at the Royal Library of Denmark since the 1660s and first published in photographic facsimile in 1936, the autograph manuscript (written and drawn by its author’s own hand) has been the topic of research in Andean studies for several decades. Prepared by an international team of technicians and scholars, the digital facsimile was placed online on the newly created Guaman Poma Website at the Royal Library in 2001. Thanks to its free global access, research has accelerated, offering new and ongoing challenges in such fields as history, art history, environmental studies, linguistics, literary, and cultural studies in Andeanist, Latin Americanist, and post-colonialist perspectives. The work’s 1,200 pages (of which 400 are full-page drawings) offer Guaman Poma’s novel account of pre-Columbian Andean and modern Spanish conquest history as well as his sometimes humorous but most often harrowing exposé of the activities of all the castes and classes of the colonial society of his day. Guaman Poma’s account reveals how social roles and identities could evolve under colonial rule over the course of a single individual’s lifetime. As a Quechua speaker who learned Spanish, and thus called an “indio ladino” by the colonizers, Guaman Poma’s Quechua-inflected Spanish prose may present reading challenges in both its handwritten form and searchable typeset transcription, but his 400 drawings welcome casual as well as scholarly and student readers into the rooms and onto the roadways of that multi-ethnic—Andean, African, Spanish, and Spanish creole—world.

The Whole Book and the Whole Picture

This chapter considers the ways in which medieval miscellanies have been available to scholars from the mid-19th century onwards, and how the uneven nature of that availability, through facsimile, edition, or commentary, has shaped perceptions of the very nature of this type of manuscript. Attention is paid to how fully facsimiles, editions, and studies represent their originals, and to the distortions of critical perception that can result from partial representation. Also noted is the tendency to privilege manuscripts that are associated with particular authors, and with scribes, patrons, or readers who can be named (even though the majority of medieval miscellanies cannot be connected to any type of biographical context); examples include John Shirley, Richard Hill, Robert Reynes, Robert Thornton, and John Vale. The merits and feasibility of editing miscellanies and producing facsimiles, especially digital facsimile, or other types of study are explored, largely in relation to English examples from the later medieval period.