1Within the “history of holographs”, the Italian tradition is an exception, since, starting with the first and most famous scartafaccio [draft] of the European tradition: the Codex of Petrarch’s draft (1348), and continuing with the manuscripts of Boccaccio, Ariosto, Bembo, Della Casa, Francesco Maria Molza, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Varchi, etc., it preserves the oldest and most extensive series of autographs or apographs with autograph corrections, both in the pre- and post-Gutenberg era (Italia 2024). This wealth of quantity and quality makes the Italian case unique in Europe.
- 1 For general overview of authorial variants and authorial philology, see Italia and Raboni 2021.
- 2 As discussed, for example, in Brugnolo 2021 and Italia 2018.
2Since the the seventeenth century, these author’s manuscripts have been the object of philological edition and critical study, and in particular Petrarch’s manuscripts testifying to the genesis of the Canzoniere — generally considered as a precious testimony of how the poet worked — were published in a prestigious edition, edited in 1642 by Francesco Ubaldini, a scholar of the circle of Francesco Barberini, nephew of Urban VIII. This edition can be considered not only the first “genetic edition”, or rather the incunabulum of authorial philology,1 which would later be developed with more scientific ecdotic criteria by Francesco Moroncini, with the first critical edition of Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti in 1927; but also an example of proto-“criticism of variants”, borne ten years after Moroncini’s edition, in 1937, with Gianfranco Contini’s Essay: As Ariosto worked.2
- 3 A curated collection of this tradition can be consulted at www.autografi.net, a project coordinated (...)
- 4 For the distinction between immediate and late variants, which Gianfranco Contini also defined: ins (...)
3The rich dossier of autographs possessed by the Italian tradition3 provides a vast picture of the typology of the authorial variants: from the genetic ones (i.e., immediate corrections, made at the moment of writing, which lead to a reading considered provisionally valid by the author) to the evolutionary corrections (which are made after a first draft and replace valid readings with others equally valid, but preferred by the author).4 A particular case of variants is the subject of this essay: the alternative variants, which represent a particular manifestation of the author’s relationship with his or her text, of what, with an effective expression, Armando Petrucci has called: the “writing relationship” (Petrucci 2017, 63–64).
4The first definition of alternative variants was given by Dante Isella, in the Note to the text of Gadda’s Racconto italiano di Ignoto del Novecento: an unpublished novel that the great engineer-writer had begun in 1924, at the beginning of his career, but which remained in his legendary “trunks” until 1983, when it was published posthumously (ten years after the author’s death) by Gadda’s greatest scholar, the founder of authorial philology: Dante Isella.
- 5 For more information, see Italia 2017, now also in French translation: Italia 2022b. For Gadda’s pa (...)
5It is no coincidence that Carlo Emilio Gadda was the author on whom this discipline was borne and developed: his discontent in the creative use of language, the “unfinished” status of his masterpieces: Acquainted with grief and That awful mess of via Merulana, and his collecting mania, which led him to keep everything to the point of saying of himself, “I am an archivist-maniac”, make Gadda the best case study of “how an author worked”, in its various phenomenologies.5
6Isella defines alternative variants as follows:
Competing readings among which the author cannot decide, or at any rate does indicate by any precise markings that he knows how to decide.
(Isella 1983, xxxiv)
Since the aim of authorial philology is not to reconstruct “in slow motion” what took place in the author’s mind and on his worktable, which is impossible, but to decipher, from the documents that the author has left us, traces and signs of his work, to analyze them and publish them in the form most suitable to the text (and subsequently, with the criticism of the variants, to interpret them in such a way as to identify guidelines, directives, corrective “isohypses”), the necessary condition for an alternative variant to be such is that the base text is not deleted.
- 6 On the “archival will” cf. Albonico and Scaffai 2015 and Italia 2024.
7The lack of deletion is the sure sign by which an author declares to himself, and to the future reader of his text (which exists “virtually”, since he has decided not to destroy his “scribblings”, thus showing a specific “archival will”),6 that his will with respect to a reading written subsequently to the basic reading is not decided; it is a will still suspended between the original reading and the alternative reading, which remains, as the word itself says, in “alternative” to the basic reading.
8This means that, in the absence of deletion, the completion of the author’s will and the philologist’s decision cannot be inferred from other elements and must conform to this “double will”. We are faced with a text that is, so to speak, “double”, a text that does not show by clear signs what the manuscripts always declare: the author’s last will.
9Alternative variants are in a sort of “limbo”: a little below the level of the text, and a little above the level of the apparatus. Therefore, the method of representation used by Isella is particular. The alternative variants are in fact represented in a subordinate position to the text, in the footnote, referring to the text of which they are, in fact, the “alternative” correction, but in a typographical body identical to that of the text, and not, as is usually the case for footnotes, in a smaller body.
10Why do we use the same typeface as the text? We do so, to declare to the reader, in an immediate way and with a clarity of visualization not secondary in the ecdotic choices, that the text he/she reads is subordinate to the text, has a lower value, because the author wrote it at a later time and did not decide whether to prefer that text to the lecture in line, but we cannot know whether he would have accepted this variant or rejected it. As for the edition of the manuscript, it is necessary for the philologist to consider this text as a variant, and not the critical text, which, according to the ecdotic practice established by Isella, follows the base reading. This is not, however, a genetic or evolutionary variant, but an “alternative” reading of the text.
11This is why, in the definition of textual levels and the relative ecdotic practices established by Isella for the representation of the author’s text, according to a series of parameters that reflect the status of the text and the relationship between text and apparatus, the alternative variants are represented with a particular formalization (see Table 1).
Table 1: Formalization of alternative variants.
CC-BY the author.
12It is important to remember that, after 1983, the ecdotic praxis applied by Isella set the standard in the Italian philological tradition, and his representation of alternative variants was adopted not only in other editions of Gadda’s works, but for all the most important editions of author’s philology, both in prose and poetry, from Manzoni to Leopardi, from Pasolini to Alberto Savinio (Italia and Raboni 2021, 57–59). This was particularly significant because, in the case of re-editions of scholarly/critical editions in paperback of previously unpublished texts, the alternative variants were not sacrificed, as is usually happens for apparatuses, but were considered an integral part of the text, and therefore published together with it, in the manner indicated above. This is an ecdotic practice that we believe can also be adopted for other editions of texts in European literature.
13The first page of the original version of the anti-fascist pamphlet Eros and Priapus (see Figure 1), dating from 1944–46, where Gadda presents a brilliant interpretation of fascism in a psychoanalytical key in a violent anti-Mussolini treatise written à la Machiavelli, offers a very clear example of the peculiarity of the alternative variants.
Figure 1: First page of the manuscript of Eros e Priapo (Eros and Priapus), original version (Archivio Liberati in Villafranca di Verona), c. 65.
Image reproduced with permission from the copyright holder.
14The page is a “clean copy”, with various corrections, dating back to different moments in the history of the text that was rejected by all the publishers as “unpublishable” because it was considered “intolerably obscene” (Gadda 1988, 46, letter from 28 October 1946). It was only published in 1967, with the author’s forced variants, after a period of twenty years in which Gadda had returned to the manuscript on several occasions. Note the different pens, and above all the difference between the basic text, the corrective series, which presents various implicit variants, and the alternative variant:
L’associazione a delinquere, cui per più di un ventennio è venuto fatto di poter taglieggiare a sua posta, e coprir d’onte e stuprare la Italia, e precipitarla finalmente in quella ruina e in quell’abisso dove Dio medesimo ha paura guardare, è pervenuta a dipingere come attività politica, la distruzione e la cancellazione della vita, la obliterazione totale dei segni della vita.
[The association of criminals, who, for more than twenty years, have been able to prey on Italy at will, to cover it with shame and rape it, and finally plunge it into that ruin and abyss where God himself is afraid to look, has come to portray as a political action, the destruction and erasure of life, the total obliteration of the signs of life.]
(Gadda 2016, 11)
- 7 This form could be defined a “polyrhematic” locution. For a definition of ’polyrhematic’ see the co (...)
15The corrections, made later but in the same handwriting and with the same pen used for the basic text (which we have marked here in bold) introduce a dissimulating variant, replacing the locution “L’associazione a delinquere” [The association of criminals], which is more transparent and more immediate in the Italian language7 with its archaic variant: “Li associati a delinquere”. Initially Gadda changes it to “I” [The], but then, significantly, he corrects this to: “Li”, which is an archaic variant of the determinative article: “Gli” [The].
16On the one hand, this correction immediately declares to the reader the literary genre of the text: a modern treatise, pretending to be ancient, as if it had been written by a new Machiavelli. On the other hand, however, it conceals a crucial historical reference, inserted by Gadda right at the beginning of his pamphlet: the speech given by Benito Mussolini in Italian Parliament on 3 January 1925, after the Matteotti murder, where the Duce, taking moral responsibility for the crime, set Fascism in motion to become a real regime with the “leggi fascistissime” ‘the ultra-Fascist laws):
Se il fascismo è stato un’associazione a delinquere, io sono il capo di questa associazione a delinquere!
[If fascism was a criminal association, I am the leader of this criminal association!]
(Mussolini 1926, 13–14)
This quotation from Mussolini is thus hidden by the stylistic elevation, by its “archaization”, with a process of dissimulation that will be used very often by Gadda, to mitigate the tremendous violence of the text, both in the correction of the manuscript and in the revision, in 1967, on the typescript for printing.8
17Let us read the final version of the manuscript, which was published by Giorgio Pinotti and myself, in the 2016 Adelphi critical edition:
L’associazione a delinquere > Li associati a delinquere, cui per più di un ventennio è venuto fatto di poter taglieggiare a lor posta, e coprir d’onte e stuprare la Italia, e precipitarla finalmente in quella ruina e in quell’abisso dove Dio medesimo ha paura guardare, pervennero a dipingere come attività politica, la distruzione e la cancellazione della vita, la obliterazione totale dei segni della vita.
[The association of criminals > The criminal associates, who, for more than twenty years, have been able to prey on Italy at their own will, to cover it with shame and rape it, and finally plunge it into that ruin and abyss where God himself is afraid to look, have come to portray as a political action the destruction and erasure of life, the total obliteration of the signs of life.]
(Gadda 2016, 11)
Because of his revision, Gadda is forced to correct the number from singular to plural, but forgets to complete the correction of the verb due to the speed and the emotional tension. Although he does not correct the “è” [is] — a quite common case of “unfinished variant”, he does make his will explicit with a series of “implicit corrections”. What is even more interesting, however, is that the author’s last will, the one published in the 1967 Garzanti edition, is different still, and even more camouflaged by the variants of the text:
Li associati, cui per più d’un ventennio è venuto fatto di poter taglieggiare a lor posta e coprir d’onta la Italia, e precipitarla finalmente a quella ruina e in quell’abisso ove Dio medesimo ha paura guatare, pervennero a dipingere come attività politica la distruzione e la cancellazione della vita, la obliterazione totale dei segni della vita.
[The associates, who, for more than twenty years, have been able to cut down on their own account and cover Italy with shame, and finally plunge it into that ruin and abyss which God himself is afraid to heal, have come to portray as a political activity the destruction and cancellation of life, the total obliteration of the signs of life.]
(Gadda 2004, 21)
L’associazione a delinquere > Li associati a delinquere > Li associati
[The association of criminals > The criminal associates > The associates]
A dissimulative variant, which prevented all the readers and scholars from recognising the direct attack on Mussolini in the first sentence of the violent pamphlet through the words of the martyr of fascism, Giacomo Matteotti.
18The case of the term “guardare” [look] — marked in bold and underlining — is different. This term is not deleted, but marked as an alternative with its “archaic” counterpart: “guatare”. This variant follows the line of correction, illustrated above, of raising the stylistic register for the purpose of concealment, and which immediately highlights the “false antique” style of the text to the reader, but which, as we can clearly see from the reproduction, was applied after the previous corrections, with different handwriting and pen.
19In this case, therefore, it is not possible to accept the reading “in text”, but it will be represented at the bottom of the page, in a footnote, linked to the text (“guardare”) with an alphabetical exponent, and, most importantly, in the same typographical body of the text:
Figure 2: Alternative reading represented at the bottom of the page.
Image reproduced with permission from the copyright holder.
However, there are particular cases that must be considered, and which reveal the hybrid nature of these variants, precisely because they reflect an undecided will, with no clear indication. In these cases, the precise analysis of the context and situation can help to identify the correct ecdotic practice.
20The position of the variant is very important, because it defines its relationship with the base text, but other accessory elements, such as underlining, are equally useful. We will analyze some cases distinguished by the topography and the spellings of the alternative variant: those in which the text is written in (1) line spacing, (2) alignment, (3) within the text; in which (4) the alternative variants are underlined and, (5) the most particular and tricky case, the one in which the line spelling is wrong and the alternative variant intervenes to correct it, even though the author has not deleted the base text.
21The cases in which alternative variants occur in interlinear position reflect a hierarchical relationship with the base text, since this is a privileged position for the late variant, for a correction of the text, and the variant is thus placed, topographically, in a position of strength with respect to the base text. In these cases, it is possible that the alternative variant also reveals, due to its content or style — as we have seen in the example from Gadda — a greater expressive force.
22What happens, however, when the alternative variant is accepted by the subsequent redaction of the manuscript? Does it not acquire, in this case, a greater value, given that the author has decided, subsequently, to “promote” it as part of the text? And does this “promotion” not entitle one to choose the alternative variant as a critical text? The answer is negative. The critical edition of a text must be justified in itself, it is an interpretation that the philologist establishes (and discusses in the Note to the text), that concerns the text itself, it cannot be modified according to subsequent witnesses (unless the subsequent witness, in the reconstruction of the general critical edition, is chosen as the witness to be “put to text”, and the first witness is represented, consequently, only in the apparatus criticus). In this case too, therefore, the alternative variant should be represented at the foot of the page, perhaps indicating with a typographical marker that it has been “promoted to text” in the next witness, i.e., that it constitutes a sort of “bridging variant”.
23This is the case of Alfieri’s manuscripts (Fig. 3), which present numerous cases of alternative variants that, in later witnesses become “evolutionary”, also because the author used to dictate to secretary Polidori the revision of his texts by reading the manuscript directly, and it is likely that he left evidence on the first manuscript (to preserve it for his memory), of his “double” will, when the secretary copied, in a new witness, his “final will”.
Figure 3: Vittorio Alfieri, Manuscript of the first draft of L’America libera (The free America), Canzone Terza, c. 86v (Ms. Alfieri 13, Laurentian Library, Florence).
Image reproduced with permission from the copyright holder.
24The cases in which the alternative variants are aligned may reflect, due to their topography, a lower “specific weight” of the variant than the interlinear ones. In fact, the aligning position is traditionally used for the author’s recording of alternative readings from different codices on examples of other authors, and the alternative variants may be affected by this habit. For Giacomo Leopardi, Italy’s most famous nineteenth century poet, for example, the habit of recording these variants during his philological activity, constitutes a model of annotation, so much so that, when he copied texts from an original dossier that has not been preserved (the autographs by Leopardi that we have are all “clean copies”), on the “good” copies, together with the text, the alternative variants were also copied, overwritten and aligned. Their frequency (which led the field of Leopardian philology to coin a specific expression for these variants: varia lectio, i.e., “series of readings different from the basic reading”), shows how Leopardi considered his papers as “living papers”, whose variants continue to stimulate poetic creation even after the text has been copied, and even after it has been published. And, in fact, most of Leopardi’s papers are kept in the National Library in Naples, where the poet spent his last years before his death, taking his papers (full of variants) with him (Italia 2019b).
25We see here an example taken from the manuscript of one of Leopardi’s most beautiful songs, Sappho’s Last Song (Fig. 4):
Figure 4: G. Leopardi, Manuscript of the L’ultimo canto di Saffo [Last Sappho’s Song] (1822), C.L. X.5.2.gamma (National Library in Naples).
Image reproduced with permission from the copyright holder.
The text is written (i.e., copied) leaving a third of the paper free, precisely to accommodate the alternative variants (and other metatextual observations, self-assessment notes or compositional notes). Leopardi, as can clearly be seen, writes them while he is copying the text ’cleanly’, and — like a pianist rehearsing the various chords on the keyboard — transcribes them in succession, even closing the series of variants with a full stop:
Transcription of part of Figure 4
Quoted text by Leopardi; translation by the author.
- 9 Note that Leopardi also put the alternative variant in the round bracket, to mark alternations to t (...)
26Sometimes, the alternative aligned variants belong to a later “corrective series”, and are written transversally to the text, as in the case of the La sera del giorno festivo [Evening of the Festive Day], where the sorrowful invocation: “Oh giorni orrendi!” [Oh horrendous days], is emphasised and intensified in the variant (affixed with a later pen): “Oh vita o giorni orrendi‘’’ [Oh life, oh horrendous days].9
Figure 5: G. Leopardi, La sera del giorno festivo [The evening of the feast day], C.L. XIII.22, p. 6 (National Library in Naples).
Image reproduced with permission from the copyright holder.
27Leopardi again provides us with an example of cases — rarer in other authors — in which, following the clean copy of the text, the recording of the alternative variants is not interlinear or aligned with the text, but in-line, distinguishing the alternative variant from the text with a round or square bracket.
28The exemplary case is constituted by the autographs of the so-called “Pisano-Recanatesi” Songs, that is, written between Pisa and Recanati from 1828 to 1830, after a period — dating from 1825 — of “poetic silence”. Returning to writing in verse, as Giacomo told his sister on 2 May 1828, “truly in the old style and with that old-fashioned heart of mine”, his compositional method had completely changed: he did not record the sources of his lexical choices in the manuscript, and tended increasingly to record alternative variants within the text.
29This is clearly seen in the manuscript of the Ricordanze [Remembrances] (Fig. 6) from 1829, where the alternative variants, which are also written both aligned and transversally, as Leopardi did with the manuscripts of the Idylls and the Songs, are also transcribed (we must remember that it is always a “clean copy”) in the text, with a personal system of brackets: round, which seem to signal a lesser uncertainty in the choice of the term, and square (visibly corrected on the round), which indicate a greater uncertainty, a suspension of the variant in the “limbo” of the alternative variants.
Figure 6: Leopardi, manuscript of Le ricordanze [Remembrances] (1829), C.L. XIII.21 (National Library of Naples) [detail].
Image reproduced with permission from the copyright holder.
Transcription of part of Figure 6
Quoted text by Leopardi; translation by the author.
- 10 For more on the critique of variants and the French Symbolists, see (Italia 2019a).
30It may seem like a graphic detail, but it is actually a revolution, because it encapsulates, a hundred years ahead of its time, a concept that Mallarmé, and in particular Valéry, would only develop in the 1930s, from which genetic criticism would derive, and which inspired Gianfranco Contini in founding, in 1937, the “criticism of variants”: that is, the concept that the poetic value of a text is not given by its final form, but also by the previous corrective stations, and that poetry is not a value but an “approximation to value” (Contini 1974, 233).10
31In the Leopardian example in Figure 4 we have seen that an alternative variant was underlined (italicized in the transcription):
Transcription of part of Figure 4
Quoted text by Leopardi; translation by the author.
32This is an infrequent but insidious case, which needs to be considered analytically. The underlining of the text, in fact, is always an indication of importance, but it is not as unambiguous as the deletion. It is only from the 16th century onwards, in fact, with the spread of printed correction practices, that underlining is used to indicate to the printer the need to italicize the text when converting it to print, but in previous centuries, and in fact long afterwards, underlining is an indication that the author gives to himself, declaring that the underlined text is “worthy of attention”.
33This means that, in the practices of self-writing, the underlining of the alternative variant may indicate a “prestige” of its own, a dignity of having the same value as the basic text, and allow for it to be considered, in the eyes of the author or an external reader, worthy of being promoted to text. Since the basic reading is not discarded, in the critical edition it must be represented as an alternative variant (footnote, with alphabetical exponent and same typographical body as the text), indicating the underlining with italics, or by underlining of the text.
34It is not uncommon for the underlined alternative variant to be chosen by the author in a subsequent redaction and promoted to text, as if the underlining, which is a sign of importance, also indicates his “preference” over the other alternative variants. It should not be thought, however, that the presence of such a case expresses a univocal signal.
35In the case of Alfieri’s manuscripts, for example, if all alternative variants were underlined and accepted in the following apograph, it would state that, in the face of a still-undecided will, the apograph would dissolve this indecision by adopting the alternative variant in the text and that the author had wanted to indicate his “preference” by underlining. This would be even more probative if there were cases of alternative variants that were not underlined and were not adopted in the text in the same apograph. Their presence would be a necessary and sufficient condition to be able to say that the alternative variants identified by the underlining are considered by the author to be worthy of replacing the base text. Even in this case, however, the reasons for putting the underlined alternative variant in the text would not be valid, since the author’s intention was revealed only at the copying stage, and not before, and was not completed by the formatting of the reading in the line. The correct ecdotic practice to follow in this second case, therefore, is to leave the base reading in the text, and to publish the underlined alternative variant (marked with italics) in the footnotes. But one can further refine this system of representation.
36Let us return to the Leopardian case we saw earlier. The underlined reading: “splendi” [shine], although underlined, is not then incorporated into text: from the first print-run of 1824 until the last of 1837 the text will read: “E tu che spunti” [And you who appears]. On the other hand, a few lines below, an alternative variant, also underlined, is “promoted” in the text and is followed by an interlinear correction, emerging from the “forest” of other variants, and imposing itself on them as an evolutionary variant:
Figure 7: G. Leopardi, Manuscript of L’ultimo canto di Saffo [The Last Canto of Sappho] (1822), C.L. X.5.2.gamma (National Library of Naples) [detail].
Image reproduced with permission from the copyright holder.
Transcription of part of Figure 7
Quoted text by Leopardi; translation by the author.
- 11 However, there are two special cases, which can be identified by comparing inks and spellings: (1) (...)
37These “special” alternative variants,11 which are “chosen” by the author by means of underlining and become evolutionary variants, in the critical edition edited by Franco Gavazzeni, have been marked by underlining and also with bold type, in order to signal their “prestige” to the reader in a clear and evident way (Leopardi 2009).
Figure 8: Giacomo Leopardi, Canti e Poesie disperse [Songs and scattered poems], critical edition edited by Franco Gavazzeni, t. I Canti, Florence, Presso l’Accademia della Crusca, 2009, p. 225.
Image reproduced with permission from the copyright holder.
38Let us go one step further in these cases of double text. What happens when it is the line text that is underlined? In this case too, the underlining (when not indicating a foreign word) is a mark of importance. Of course, it must be an underlining and not a deletion. It is difficult to confuse an underlining mark with a deletion mark in the case of a unique witness, because deletion has its own unambiguous marks (erasion, horizontal frieze, spiral, serration, etc.), even though one may sometimes find oblique and indecisive deletions. Faced with a manuscript that presents an underlined (but not redacted) stave reading, and an alternative variant, the underlining should be considered a mark of importance of the first reading, a sort of reinforcement of the author’s preference for the stave text, leaving the alternative intention in a subordinate position. In this case, the correct edition would put the first reading in the text, marking it in italics (and reproducing, according to the usual method, the alternative variant).
- 12 Benedetto Varchi, a 16th-century polygraph in the court of Cosimo I, for whom he became the histori (...)
39Let us now look at one last interesting and insidious case. The case of an alternative variant referring to an incorrect base reading, as in the example taken from Benedetto Varchi’s12 unfinished commentary on Aristotle’s Meteorologica, of which only a rough draft survives. The typology of alternative variants is as follows:
40In these two examples, variants are adiaphora, but one undoubtedly improves the sense of the text.
41The example in Figure 9, c. 223r, (“insegnamento” [teaching] / “trattamento” [treatment]), is an example of an adiaphora variant.
Figure 9: c. 223r
Image reproduced with permission from the copyright holder.
Transcription of part of Figure 9
Quoted text by Varchi; translation by the author.
42The example in Figure 10, c. 238r, is similar to that in Figure 9: the legitimacy of the reading is derived from the meaning of the sentence; in it Varchi explains the nature of the vapour that rises from the water due to the effect of the sun and therefore it is hot and humid, as he writes a few lines later:
Figure 10: c. 238r
Image reproduced with permission from the copyright holder.
Transcription of part of Figure 10
Quoted text by Varchi; translation by the author.
43It is not clear what Varchi means by underlining the basic reading: on the one hand, one could say that the author wants to keep the original reading, that is, that the underlining indicates his “preference” for the basic text, but in one case it is the opposite, since the alternative reading is the correct one. Let us look at two examples: one dubious (1), the other in which the alternative variant is correct, despite the fact that the text is underlined (2).
44In the example of Figure 11, c. 231v, the basic reading is: “se la natura mi dà e la consuetudine mi mantiene” (the underlined part in italics). If I have interpreted correctly, Varchi first adds: “l’uso non mi toglie sopra la consuetudine mi mantiene”, and then writes “conserva” above “mantiene”. Could it be that the underlining indicates that he wants to return to the original reading?
Figure 11: c. 231v
Quoted text by Varchi; translation by the author.
45The example in Figure 12, c. 235v is much simpler: the reading of “cold” is undoubtedly the correct one from the point of view of coherence. Indeed, Varchi explains the phenomenon of “counter-resistance” through the example of the middle region of the atmosphere, which is cooled because the “cold”, moist vapours rising from the water towards the extreme region of the air are pushed down by the latter due to the effect of the heat. In this case, it is extremely important to assess the nature of the error, because the fact that the basic, incorrect reading is not corrected may be a simple oversight (a case similar to the one we saw earlier of “inconclusive” variant), but also reveal the author’s uncertainty about recognizing the error and correcting the text (and, by maintaining the basic reading, he signals this indecision to himself). In the critical edition of the text, if the philologist recognizes the error as genuine, he is obliged to amend it, promoting the alternative variant (which becomes an evolutionary variant) to text and indicating in the note to the text that the correction was made on the basis of the author’s intention provided by the alternative variant. The alternative variant, of course, will not be carried over to the footnote, because it would be identical to the text (and because it is no longer an alternative variant).
Figure 12: c. 235v
Image reproduced with permission from the copyright holder.
Transcription of part of Figure 12
Quoted text by Varchi; translation by the author.
If, on the other hand, the correction is not recognized as certain, i.e. if the base reading is not obviously incorrect, the philologist is not obliged to correct the text, rather, it is better to treat the alternative variant as an “inconclusive” reading, perhaps pointing out to the reader, in the Note to the text, the possibility that the alternative variant has been introduced to amend an incorrect base text.
46These case studies, which represent the most widespread phenomenologies of alternative variants, show how this particular typology of variants, apparently simple, is in reality very complex, and in some cases really insidious, but, unlike genetic and evolutionary variants, which have a unique identity and can be easily represented once the manuscript has been deciphered and the appropriate formalization followed, in analyzing the alternative variants the philologist is obliged to examine the entire tradition of the text, both preceding and subsequent, in order to understand their “double” status and to arrive, as justifiably as possible, at a critical edition that communicates to the reader the intermediate textual level that they represent: a sort of a “limbo”, but also a place of textual “possibilities”, of potentialities yet to come to fruition, which allow us to understand the most hidden folds of the text, and often its fascinating motivations.