Editorial Principles and Practice
These are the Editorial Principles as they were published in November 2015 for the publication of the third module: Krapp's Last Tape / La Dernière Bande. The document in its
first state (published on 24/06/2011) can be found here. The
document in its state at the publication of L'Innommable in 2013, can be found here. The document in its current state can be found here.
Genetic Criticism and Textual Scholarship
The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project functions both as a digital archive
and as a genetic edition[1] in that digitally
reunites the manuscripts of Samuel Beckett's works and facilitates the exploration and
examination of the genetic dossier[2] from diverse
perspectives. Maria Teresa Giaveri has drawn attention to the difference between
'éditions génétiques' and 'éditions
critico-génétiques'.[3] The latter tend to
present the transcriptions and other representations of the manuscripts at the service
of a critically edited text ne varietur. Especially in France,
any suggestion of a filiation between 'philology' or 'textual scholarship' on the one
hand and critique génétique on the other tends to be
denied. One of the most notable pleas against this filiation is Jean-Louis Lebrave's
article 'La critique génétique: une discipline nouvelle ou un avatar moderne
de la philologie' in the first and landmark publication of the journal Genesis (1992).[4]
In the meantime, genetic criticism and textual scholarship continue to
develop their divergent approaches, but also mutually respect each other's
specificity.[5] Both approaches
imply some form of interpretation: in critical editing, the critical aspect is notably
presented in the form of an edited text; in genetic criticism, the critical aspect is
present in the reconstruction of the dynamics of the composition process. Both
approaches also show an openness toward each other: within the discipline of textual
scholarship, the study of early stages of a literary work (textual criticism) pays
increasing attention to interpretive consequences; genetic criticism in its turn
realizes that the first component of its double task (making the manuscripts accessible)
can benefit from the experience of different editorial and philological traditions, but
it does consider the second component (the reconstruction of the genesis) to be its main
objective.
The BDMP tries to accomplish genetic criticism's double task by (1) making
Samuel Beckett's manuscripts accessible and (2) analysing the composition process in
order to open the manuscripts' hermeneutic potential. To discuss the
project's editorial principles, [6] Stirrings Still / Soubresauts and Comment dire / what is the
word, will serve as illustrations.
Bilingual, Genetic, Digital
To situate the project within the context of Beckett studies, it may be
useful to start from the established goals and criteria of the Series of
Variorum Editions of Samuel Beckett's Bilingual Works as outlined in Charles
Krance's edition of Beckett's Mal vu mal dit / Ill Seen Said (1996). [7] With reference to
the series's first edition (Company/Compagnie and A Piece of
Monologue/Solo: A Bilingual Variorum Edition, ed. by Charles Krance, New York
and London: Garland, 1993), this second edition introduced significant changes to the
apparatus 'so as to make it more 'user friendly'' (Krance 1996: viii). To highlight only the
variants between versions, undue repetition was avoided in the variant synopses by means
of diacritical signs that indicated passages without variants vis-à-vis the
previous version.
According to French theoreticians of critique
génétique, a genetic edition should provide the reader with all the
versions of the work's genesis in extenso. One of the reasons why
the first three variorum editions in the Series did not include full transcriptions was
the codex format (Krance 1996:
xiii). In 1996, the Series' editorial board was 'not yet convinced of the
overall desirability of electronic editions' (xiii).
But more recent developments in electronic scholarly editing have made it
possible to create an easily searchable environment, containing facsimiles and full
transcriptions of all the versions. Apart from this digital archive, the genetic edition
also enables its users to zoom in on any textual unit and compare it to the
corresponding passage in all the other versions. How the project combines the functions
of a digital archive an a genetic edition is the topic of the following sections.
Facsimiles and Transcriptions
The design of the genetic dossier is based on an encoding in XML (eXtensible
Markup Language). With regard to the XML encoding of the transcriptions, the Beckett
Digital Manuscript Project makes use of the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative
(TEI P5). When the TEI published version 2.0.0. of its P5 guidelines, it incorporated
most of the recommendations made by the Text Encoding Initiative's 'Special Interest
Group' (SIG) working on genetic editions,[8]. The BDMP uses some
of these new tags, but also deviates in some instances from the SIG's encoding model.
The SIG proposes to complement a text-oriented approach with a
document-oriented approach. The latter focuses on the physical object, comprising one or
more written surfaces. The rationale behind the clear distinction between a
document-oriented and a text-oriented approach on the level of the encoding is partly
based on the traditional distinction between 'Befund' (record) and 'Deutung'
(interpretation) (Zeller 1995). At the
level of the encoding, however, a document-oriented approach is not totally
'interpretation'-free. For instance, the use of the 'change' attribute to indicate
different writing stages or 'revision campaigns' may require a great amount of
interpretation on the part of the editor or transcriber, especially when the author used
the same writing tool for both the 'first layer' of the text and for the revisions.
The BDMP works with a text-oriented approach, but not without taking
'toposensitive' (Ferrer 1998,
262) data into account. The 'record' ('Befund') is represented by means of digital
facsimiles, while the transcriptions are regarded as forms of 'interpretation'
('Deutung') of the manuscripts because they are never fully free of
interpretation.
The genetic edition offers two transcriptions (topographic and linear) of
each version, in combination with digital facsimiles. Jean-Louis Lebrave recommends the
combination of a facsimile with a topographic transcription, arguing that a linear
transcription reduces the manuscript to a textual model (Lebrave 1993, 214). The opposite viewpoint was
voiced by Claudine Quémar, who argued that (at least with reference to Marcel
Proust's manuscripts) a 'simple' topographic transcription would merely decipher the
letters, whilst abandoning the reader in the chaos of the pages (Quémar 1976, 64-65). Implicitly, Quémar
thus insisted on a distinction between deciphering and transcribing.
Yet, these two diverging viewpoints are not irreconcilable. On the one hand,
a topographic transcription is not always that 'simple'; on the other hand, a linear
transcription does not necessarily imply a 'reduction'. They are both transformations,
and the combination of a topographic with a linear transcription proves to be an
adequate way to perfect the approximation of the original, according to the principle
formulated by Almuth Grésillon: 'L'objectif de la transcription n'est pas la
perfection, mais la perfectibilité' (Grésillon 1994, 129). The BDMP therefore
enables the reader at any point to send suggestions or alternative transcriptions to the
editorial board with the 'Your comments' button.
Transcription method
According to Daniel Ferrer's principle that 'the draft is not a text'
but 'a protocol for making a text' (Ferrer 1998, 261), the BDMP offers the
facsimile of the draft (the protocol) and different interpretations of that protocol
in the form of two types of transcription, a document-oriented transcription and a
text-oriented transcription.
a. The topographic transcriptions decipher the
texts of the manuscripts and reconstruct their page layout. The result is merely an
attempt to recreate the impression of the original document (e.g. by reconstructing
the topography, the font, and the type of paper). The type font used for the
transcription of typescripts is 'Courier'; holograph manuscripts or additions in
Beckett's hand are in 'Arial Narrow'. The colours correspond with the colours of
Beckett's writing tools.
In the modules of the BDMP where topographic transcriptions are not
feasible due to the amount of manuscript pages (for instance in the case of long
prose texts such as the novels of the trilogy), the purpose of bridging the gap
between image (facsimile) and text (XML transcription) is served by a segmented
pop-up transcription ('text/image'), drawing directly on the linear transcription in
XML, but segmented (i.e. only presented in small segments) and linked directly to
the relevant zone on the facsimile.
These coordinates are stored in a separate file (coordinates.xml).
b. The linear transcriptions of the documents
preserved at the holding libraries translate the signs on the manuscript into a
textual format, with as little diacritical signs as possible.
The default visualisation does not indicate the place of additions or
Beckett's writing tools, but this information is encoded in the XML and can be made
explicit in the linear transcription (see 'Manual', subsection 'Tools').
Transcription conventions
The electronic encoding makes it possible to visualize the
linear transcriptions in different ways. In the default visualization, the
deletions are crossed through:
-
strikethrough: deletion;
-
double strikethrough: deletion within a deletion;
-
superscript: addition;
-
supersuperscript: addition to an addition;
-
green: addition on the facing leaf;
-
gray: unclear reading;
-
x: illegible character.
-
xx: illegible 2-character word.
-
xxx: illegible word of 3 or more characters.
-
xxxxxx: transposition (relocated text)
-
heavily deleted passage;
-
passage deleted by (a) diagonal line(s);
-
passage deleted by means of a cross;
-
[bold]: metamarks (e.g. numbers, arrows, crosses or other symbols introduced by the author to indicate how the text is to be read, where an addition needs to be inserted in the text, etc.);
-
subscript superscript: open variants (the author hesitates between two alternatives: 'What is the right correct word?')
The transcription of each version is accompanied by a
thumbnail that gives a graphic impression of the relevant document's layout.
Genetic Relations
Document Level: Writing Tools and Revision Campaigns
To mark revision campaigns, the TEI Special Interest Group working
on genetic editions suggested the declaration of 'stage' in the XML header and
the use of a stage attribute. This was incorporated into the 2.0 release of P5,
not with the 'stage' element and attribute, but by adding a second use to the
'change' element and global attribute. However, these different stages cannot
always be discerned unequivocally, especially if the author made corrections and
additions in the same writing tool as the main text. In many cases, one of the
few indications of a new revision campaign is a change of writing tools. For
instance, when a manuscript in black ink features some additions in red crayon,
the new writing tool very often indicates a new writing campaign. The BDMP
therefore offers an alternative by highlighting the different writing tools to
facilitate the study of revision campaigns.
A good example for such a study of revision campaigns is UoR MS 2933-5. This
version was written with a typewriter and contains corrections in both black and
red ink. These writing tools are encoded in the XML markup and visualized in
different fonts/colours.
Similarly, immediate alterations (currente
calamo) have been encoded with the 'type' attribute 'instant
correction' in the deletion tag (for details, see the brief technical
documentation in the appendix).
TOP LAYER
In the default visualization all deletions and additions are indicated. For instance, the first line of the first document (UoR MS 2933/1/1) reads:
In the default visualization all deletions and additions are indicated. For instance, the first line of the first document (UoR MS 2933/1/1) reads:
Tout tout le temps Toujours à la même distance...
If users do not wish to see these deletions and additions, a 'top
layer' visualisation may facilitate the reading. In this 'top layer'
visualization, deleted passages are not displayed and additions are not
distinguished as additions, resulting in a reading text of the final version of
the draft:
Tout Toujours à la même distance ...
As the example indicates, the transcription does not standardize what
is deciphered. Beckett may have intended the addition 'Toujours' to be
incorporated in the sentence starting with 'Tout' (implying that 'toujours'
should start with a lower-case 't'), but if - as in this case - he wrote it with
a capital 'T', the transcription endeavours to render the letters and
punctuation as they are found in the manuscript. In some cases the 'top layer'
option may give a misleading impression. For instance in UoR MS 2935/3/8
the protagonist's hands are said to be 'At rest after all
what they did.' Beckett first
wrote 'all', then deleted it, added 'what', deleted this addition again, and did
not substitute it with any alternative. Because of this lack of any
substitution, none will be visualized in the 'top layer' option. A comparison
with the next version indicates that Beckett (by means of the deleted addition
without substitution) silently reverted to the original word 'all'. But in and
of itself, the manuscript of UoR MS 2935/3/8 shows more hesitancy than resolution. In this
case, the 'top layer' option will respect the unresolved nature of this moment
of hesitation and the resulting lacuna in the sentence's syntax.
Dossier Level: versions and paralipomena
A document may contain several versions of a work (or of more than
one work). Peter Shillingsburg has defined a version as 'one specific form of
the work - the one the author intended at some particular moment in time' (Shillingsburg 1996,
44), which may serve as a suitable working definition. According to Siegfried
Scheibe's definition, textual versions are 'achieved or unachieved elaborations
of the text that diverge from one another. They are related through textual
identity and distinct through variation' (Scheibe 1995, 207). Theoretically this
implies that one single authorial revision is enough to create a new version.
For pragmatic reasons, however, the definition of version as employed in the
Beckett Digital Manuscript Project is broader than a writing stage, i.e. one
version may contain several layers of revision or 'campagnes de
révision'.
The main danger of a teleological perspective is the neglect of
passages (especially in the early manuscripts) that did not make it into the
base text (see also chapter 'Base texts').
Nonetheless, there may be several versions of these passages, so that they
should be comparable too. For instance, in the case of Stirrings Still, the
first paragraph of the first few abandoned sections starts with the phrase 'Tout
Toujours à la même distance', translated as 'All always at the same
remove.' After a few versions, Beckett abandoned this path in the writing
process, so that it remained a dead end.
In textual criticism 'paralipomena' are usually defined as holograph
material that does not belong to a version, but is somehow linked to it,
thematically or otherwise (Mathijsen 1997, 44-47). Since its Greek etymology means 'what is left
out', paralipomena have often been left out of scholarly editions. The BDMP
includes them, since these loose jottings, ideas, false starts and potential
alternatives are of special importance to the study of the composition process.
Collation and Relative Calibration
Scholarly editions in a printed format usually present textual
variants between versions in an apparatus variorum. To save paper space the
invariant passages are left out and the editor has to make use of a complex set
of diacritical signs, which may be somewhat intimidating. Such an apparatus also
requires a considerable effort from its readers to reconstruct the textual
context of the variants. Without the restrictions of the codex format, the
electronic apparatus can offer the possibility to indicate the variants in their context: the structure of the whole sentence
always remains intact and variants between two versions are highlighted.
Traditionally the notion of variants applies to either variation
between copies of ancient or medieval documents by scribes, or between different
editions of a work. When dealing with modern texts, it may be useful to make a
distinction between 'genetic' variants ('rewritings') and 'transmissional'
variants. Moreover, the edition of bilingual works requires an extra category of
'translation variants.' On the Estate of Samuel Beckett's request the genetic
edition of the BDMP focuses on the prepublication history and is limited to
genetic and translation variants. A critical apparatus of transmissional
variants can be presented as a separate electronic tool accompanying critically
edited texts of Samuel Beckett's complete works as envisaged by Faber and Faber.
Genetic variants (rewritings)
Pierre-Marc de Biasi argues that in the case of modern manuscripts it
is difficult to speak of 'variants'; instead he uses alternative expressions
such as 'rewritings' or 'genetic operations', arguing that it is impossible to
speak of 'variants' if there is no 'invariant' (de Biasi 2000, 20). No matter how
valuable this argument is, the notion of 'variants' can still be employed to
conceptualize a genetic edition. From a pragmatic perspective it seems useful to
employ the notion of 'variants' as an umbrella term. Even if one does not wish
to employ the term 'variants' to designate 'rewritings', one can only visualize
them by contrasting them with another version and highlighting those instances
that 'vary'. Although in genetic criticism there is not an absolute invariant
(i.e. not a fixed point against which the 'rewritings' can be measured), it is
possible to apply a system of relative calibration. If there is no invariant to
compare the variants with, it is always possible to compare a variant with
another variant, on condition that the edition indicates which variant serves as
a 'temporary invariant' (for instance the previous version in the chronology of
composition).
Every literary genesis is characterized by a dialectic of copied and
new elements, identity and variance (Ferrer 2002, 48). To visualize this
dialectic it seems important to indicate not just the isolated 'variants' (as in
a traditional apparatus variorum) but to indicate or highlight these
modifications in their syntactical context, i.e. leaving the structure of the
whole sentence intact.
The 'top layer' option can be employed for digitally supported
collation. The syntactical context of each segment remains intact, but to
highlight the variants, they have to be encoded first. In view of the large
amount of manuscript materials in several modules of the BDMP, the project would
not be able to include the option of manually encoding an apparatus in all of
the transcriptions.
As an alternative, the Centre for Manuscript Genetics at the
University of Antwerp is working together with Ronald Dekker, Bram Buitendijk
and Joris van Zundert at the Huygens ING institute in The Hague to test the
possibilities of digitally supported collation by means of the CollateX
algorithm (as part of the European COST Action IS0704 'Interedition: An
Interoperable Supranational Infrastructure for Digital Editions').[9]
One of the complicating elements of the test case Stirrings Still / Soubresauts is the rather large number of versions
in combination with the presence of deletions and additions. In a first phase,
the latter problem was solved by working with the top layer of each draft
version. We tried to apply this top layer system to test the first research
results of CollateX. All top layer versions of a segment were prepared in the
JSON syntax required by CollateX. This data is transferred through a REST
service to the CollateX algorithm. The collation happens on the fly and the
output takes the form of a table, aligning invariant passages and variant
passages. The segmentation of the textual material not only reduces the danger
for the user to get lost in the jungle of manuscripts, but also determines the
speed of the almost instant collation.
Usually, digital 'archives' are distinguished from 'editions' because
the latter offer a critical apparatus. An interoperable tool such as CollateX
can enable any user - not necessarily an editor - to transform a digital archive
into an electronic edition. As a consequence of these developments in scholarly
editing, the strict boundary between digital archives and electronic editions is
becoming increasingly permeable, resulting in a continuum rather than a
dichotomy.
Our automatic collation feature now collates not just the
uncancelled text of a version but the entire version, deletions included. Deletions, additions and open
variants are
represented in the alignment table in the same way as they are in the
transcriptions. Deleted words can now be aligned with occurrences of those words
in other versions and in this way the collation gives a much more refined
overview of the genesis of a sentence.
We would like to express our gratitude to Ronald Dekker, lead
developer of CollateX, for
pointing out the pre-tokenized input format supported by CollateX that made this
possible.
Translation variants
Non-equivalent instances between the English and French versions are
called 'mismatches' by Magessa O'Reilly. A vertical bar 'indicates the position
that would most likely have been occupied by the matching segment, were it
present' (O'Reilly in
Beckett 2001, xiii). O'Reilly also acknowledges that these are obviously
not the only instances of non-equivalence. He mentions shifts of verb tense, of
singular and plural, of person or register, etc., and adds that 'it would be
impossible to point out such an endless array of mismatchings' (xiii). In his
edition of Comment c'est O'Reilly points out the
difficulty of establishing criteria to decide which variants should be marked or
not. Minor instances of non-equivalence are not always signalled, in order not
to overshoot the target.
In 'L'Évolution du sujet s'auto-traduisant: L'imaginaire de
Beckett face à Malone meurt, Happy Days et Stirrings Still à traduire', Linda Collinge points out
that in the case of Soubresauts 'la traduction est extrêmement proche de
l'original' (2000, 199). In
the vast majority of cases, mismatches or translation variants are also genetic
variants, i.e. they may be regarded as rewritings and may therefore benefit from
a similar treatment as the one applied to genetic variants. This implies that
the publication of Beckett's self-translation is not necessarily to be regarded
as the end of the genesis, but as its continuation.
Base texts
The BDMP functions as a research environment that is non-hierarchical
in the sense that each text can be compared to any other text and that no text
is singled out as being more important or 'definitive' than the other versions.
In the underlying markup, this system of relative calibration is based on a
numbering system keyed to a so-called 'base text'. The CSE Guidelines for
Editors of Scholarly Editions define a 'base text' as a 'text chosen by an
editor to compare with other texts of the same work in order to record textual
variation among them': 'Unlike a copy-text, it is not assigned any presumptive
authority and may not even be used to construct a critical text, serving instead
only as an anchor or base to record textual variants.' (http://www.mla.org/cse_guidelines).
According to the same guidelines, a copy-text is 'the specific
arrangement of words and punctuation that an editor designates as the basis for
the edited text and from which the editor departs only where deeming emendation
necessary. Under Greg's rationale the copy-text also has a presumptive authority
in its accidentals (...) Its selection is based on the editor's judgment that
the authority of its accidentals is on the whole superior to other possible
texts that could be chosen for copy-text.' To avoid any confusion because of the
implicit link with W. W. Greg and Fredson Bowers' copy-text theory, which
presupposes a very specific editorial approach, the term 'copy-text' is not
employed in the present genetic edition. The base text is merely a tool in the
underlying markup as a basis for the numbering of sentences.
The choice of the base texts in the BDMP is linked to the moment the
author was on the verge of presenting his text to the public. In Pierre-Marc de
Biasi's 'Functional Typology of Genetic Documentation' (1996), the 'bon à
tirer' moment (pass for press) is presented as a dividing line, marking 'the
decisive moment when what had been in a pliable and mobile manuscript state up
to that point becomes fixed in the frozen shape of a published text' (Biasi 1996, 37). The
metaphor of the 'frozen shape' is somewhat problematic since the genesis of the
text often continues even after the first publication (as for instance the
editions of the theatrical notebooks and the revised texts illustrate), but the
'bon à tirer' does mark an important transition from the private atmosphere
of the manuscripts to the public representation of the text. Since, on the
Beckett Estate's request, the BDMP focuses on what precedes the published
versions, the base text is the text of the last extant document preceding the
'bon à tirer' moment. Even though this project focuses on the creative
process rather than on the product, the choice of a base text does imply the
recognition that the notion of a finished product plays an important role in the
genesis since every project implies a form of teleology.[10] The BDMP
can therefore function perfectly well in tandem with critically edited texts or
with the reading texts as published by Editions de Minuit, Grove Press or Faber
and Faber, together representing the dialectics of Beckett's works between
completion and incompletion.
In the case of Stirrings Still, the choice of
the base text is marked by the delay between the writing of the first two
sections and the third one. The base text for the first two sections is the text
of document UoR MS
2859; the base text for the third section, that of UoR MS 2935/5/3.
The first sentence of the second section in typescript UoR MS 2859 is marked
by an open variant. The sentence starts as follow: 'As one in his right mind
when at last out again he knew not...' The words 'he knew not' are underlined
(not cancelled), and Beckett has added the alternative 'no knowing' above the
line.[11] So even
at this late stage in the composition process Beckett kept revising his text.
Since this hesitation is an integral part of the composition process, the base
text does not represent the author's 'final intention'; it simply serves as an
anchor to record composition variants and translation variants, and make the
versions comparable.
For a bilingual comparison, this base text can be compared to the
computer print-out of the translated version (UoR MS 3543) on which
Beckett has written 'Final'. This version differs in some instances from the
text published by Les Éditions de Minuit (both in a limited edition of 99 +
10 copies and in a paperback edition). The nature of the changes suggests that
Beckett was open to suggestions by his French publisher Jérôme Lindon
(e.g. 'lorsqu'amortis' / 'lorsque amortis'; 'se clouer debout' / 'se figer
debout'; 'cloué sur place' / 'figé sur place'). Even during earlier
stages of the translation process (for instance on 9 May 1989, in reaction to
the translation of the first part of Stirrings Still) the
publisher not only expressed his admiration for the new work and for the
translation, but also felt free to point out a few minor errors, such as the
absence of a double m in the word 'sufisamment' or the wrong gender of the word
'horloge'.
The base text of Comment dire in the BDMP is
the text of the typescript preserved at the Beckett Archive in Reading, dated
'29.10.88' (UoR MS
3317). The base text for the English version is UoR MS 3506.
Method of Representation
Diverse Perspectives
The advantage of encoding the transcriptions is the resulting
flexibility of the textual material, based on Ted Nelson's principle of
'transclusion': the same piece of information can have meaning in a variety of
contexts and in each of these contexts the shared data can be retrieved without
duplicating them. The codex format could not include full transcriptions,
otherwise the user would get lost in the abundance of textual material.
The flexibility of the transclusive electronic medium allows the
edition to offer full transcriptions, retrievable either in their entirety or
piecemeal, in different contexts:
1. The documents can be studied in the order of their catalogue
numbers. The digital facsimiles of these documents are presented with different
tools, such as a digital magnifying glass:
If the passage is hard to decipher, a transcription may be of help:
(only applied in Stirrings Still / Soubresauts and Comment dire / what
is the word)
2. The chronology of the composition process can be visualized in the
form of a genetic map. In the case of Stirrings Still / Soubresauts, dead
ends in the genetic dossier (passages that did not make
it into the published text) are indicated as 'abandoned sections'. The language
is indicated by means of shades of grey: dark grey for English, light grey for
French.
3. All versions of sentences that made it into the published text can
be called up and the textual variants between them can be studied with the
option 'Compare sentences'.
4. The rearrangement per language shows that Beckett often switched
between French and English during the composition process. In the Stirrings
Still module, translations (i.e. authorial translations) can be examined
separately.
Version comparison
Composition variants:
The genetic edition offers the possibility to compare textual units.
The most useful unit is usually the smallest one: the sentence or segment,
marked with a <seg> tag, is followed by a stable
identifier consisting of the catalogue number of the relevant holding library
and - between square brackets - the number of the sentence or segment in the
'base text':
<seg n="MS-UoR-2934,[0036]">
Only segments that made it into the published text are numbered (for
instance the sentences of the abandoned sections 'Before Stirrings Still' are not numbered). Usually the size of the segment
<seg> is a sentence. In cases such as Not I / Pas moi, where Beckett did not work with full
sentences, the segment consists of a few lines of text, a unit of text that can
easily be compared to other versions. By means of the segment numbers, any
version of a segment that made it into the published text can be compared to any
other version of that segment (for more details, see the Manual).
(only applied in Stirrings
Still/Soubresauts and Comment dire/ what is the word)
Translation variants:
The option 'Bilingual comparison' (under 'Language') facilitates
the systematic comparison of the author's translation with the base text.
The variants are highlighted by means of a colour code. The option 'Early
translations' enables the comparative study of the translations Beckett
started during the composition process.
Bilingual Dynamic Comparison
One special visualization is only applicable to the unique form
of Beckett's last work. In Comment dire / what is the
word the genesis of the text becomes its theme; the text
(product) presents itself as a process of writing (production). At first
sight, the text looks like a poem, but it can also be read as an attempt to
write one single sentence. The option 'Dynamic Text' visualizes this
attempt. Every 3 seconds it automatically shows the next step in the
fictionalized composition of the sentence; or one can pass through the
stages manually at one's own pace. The purpose of this option is to
visualize the dynamics of this text between completion and incompletion.
'Your Comments' and 'Revision History'
The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project is updatable. To give readers
and researchers the opportunity to contribute to the project, for instance by
suggesting a correction or a transcription for a passage that could not be
deciphered up to now, there is a permanent link ('Your comments', in the top
right corner of the screen). This permanent link leads to a comments page, where
readers can comment on any document, to suggest for instance an alternative
reading of a hardly legible autograph passage. The editors receive this comment
along with the automatically generated URL of the digital facsimile it relates
to. The comment is presented to the editorial board and if necessary to the
advisory board. If the editorial board decides the correction is a valuable
contribution, the transcription in the XML document will be changed. In the
header of the XML document, the change is recorded in a <change> tag: person A is responsible for the change of 'X' to
'Y' at a particular date. In the case of a modified transcription, a box
entitled 'Revision history' will subsequently appear at the top of the linear
transcription of the document. This box lists all the revision information in
such a way that a state of the transcription at a particular point in time can
always be reconstructed. Since all changes are documented, the transcription can
be quoted without the risk of any passage being silently changed.
(For more practical details, see 'Manual',
subsection 'Tools'; for technical
details, see 'Brief Technical documentation'.)
Notes:
[1] For a further
discussion of the continuum, rather than dichotomy, between digital archives and
editions, see chapter "Genetic
variants (rewritings)".
[2] Almuth
Grésillon suggests the term 'dossier génétique' as a more suitable
alternative for the term avant-texte, coined by Jean
Bellemin-Noël in his book Le Texte et l'avant-texte: Les
Brouillons d'un poème de Milosz (Paris: Larousse, 1972).
[3] During the
international colloquium on genetic criticism 'Génétique des textes et des
fomes: l'œuvre comme processus', 2-9 September 2010, Centre culturel
international de Cerisy-la-Salle.
[4]
'L'établissement d'une édition critique n'est pas en soi une démarche
génétique. C'est un travail qui procède d'une logique autre, dans
laquelle tout gravite autour du texte, qu'il s'agit de reconstituer ou de
construire' (Lebrave 1992, 66).
[5] In the important
volume on 'Théorie' of the same journal (Genesis 30),
Daniel Ferrer summarizes these specificities as follows: 'Pour dire les choses en
deux mots et pour simplifier à l'extrême, la philologie s'intéresse
à la répétition du texte, tandis que la critique génétique
s'intéresse au processus de création, c'est-à-dire à
l'invention; l'une vise à établir le texte en le faisant émerger de
la foule de ses incarnations accidentelles, alors que l'autre a plutôt pour
effet de le déstabiliser en le confrontant à l'ensemble de ses brouillons'
(Ferrer 2010, 21).
[6] These principles
were elaborated for the MLA-CSE volume on Electronic Textual
Editing, (Hulle
2006)
[7] "First, it provides
Beckett's reader of either his English or French texts with a complete range of
manuscript variants, which, with the help of the synoptical apparatus, allows the
reader to reconstruct and study the text's evolution through its various drafts.
Secondly, by aligning the two versions of the texts on matched, face-to-face pages,
it enables the bilingual reader to read both versions 'simultaneously' and
comparatively. Thirdly, the fact that both versions are presented with all available
variants makes it possible to pursue, in depth, comparative analyses of Beckett's
bilingual œuvre." (Krance 1996: vii)
[8]
http://www.tei-c.org/SIG/Manuscripts ;
http://www.tei-c.org/Vault/P5/2.0.0/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/
[9] The first test
results were presented during the 'Interedition' workshop on 'Current Issues in
Digitally Supported Collation' within the European research framework of COST
'Interedition' 18-19 November 2009, venue: Fondation Universitaire / Universitaire
Stichting, organisation: Centre for Manuscript Genetics, University of Antwerp.
[10] From a
historical perspective, it is understandable that genetic criticism has often
opposed a teleological perspective, but as Daniel Ferrer argues: 'c'est en vain que
la critique génétique s'exhorte régulièrement à renoncer
à une vision téléologique de la genèse. La téléologie
n'est pas un artefact critique - elle est inhérente aux mécanismes
génétiques' (Ferrer
1994, 100).
[11] On 9 June 1988,
Beckett decided in favour of 'he knew not', by means of a small white card he sent
to John Calder (IMEC, Fonds John Calder, dossier Beckett N° 2, CAL2 C51 B2
[1-4]).
© 2021 Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project
Directors: Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon | Technical realisation: Vincent
Neyt
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