HUNGARIAN STUDIES 2. No. 1. Nemzetközi Magyar Filológiai Társaság. Akadémiai Kiadó Budapest [1986]

Emery George: Textual Problems of Miklós Radnóti's Bor Notebook

E. GEORGE in imparting lessons of precisely such a nature. For if a part of the poet's ethical steadfastness is communicated in the craftsmanship of the poems, and even in the precision and beauty of the handwriting (neither of which has eluded critical notice), then it seems self-understood that ethical aspects of reception of the canon are inseparable from our responsibility to the text. And such responsibility makes sense only ifit can express itself in concern with the minutiae of textual scholarship—indeed with the difference between "Lager Heidemann" and "Lager Heidenau", along with a number of other such differences and their implications. In what follows I would like to offer, for the first time, to my knowledge, a critical edition of the Bor Notebook: a complete description of the document, accompanied by variant apparatus and textual commentary. This is on the one hand a timely undertaking; more than a decade following the first appearance of the facsimile, an interested reading public deserves to have its attention called to all the details of the Notebook whose communicability lies beyond reasonable doubt. To an extent, such an effort at textual study may also help satisfy the expectations of scholars who have repeatedly either called for a critical edition or have made attempts at textual study themselves.3 On the other hand it is a hazardous undertaking, and can lay claim to preliminary validity at best. The original manuscript of the Bor Notebook, while it was obviously released to a publisher for purposes of publication in facsimile, is to this day not available for viewing and use by individual scholars; at least Mrs. Radnóti, the poet's widow, has not permitted me to examine it. The same is true of the originals of the copies that the poet prepared at camp for a campmate, the sociologist Sándor Szálai.4 In the descriptive portions of the edition, then, I will be examining not actual manuscripts but rather a facsimile (of the Notebook) and a printed text (of the Szálai copies), respectively; both of these available documents are treated below as hyparchetypes. In addition it must be borne in mind that problems of discriminability may be compounded by the presence of a halftone prepared by means of screening; how severe such difficulties are, only an eventual comparison of facsimile with the original can determine. For the time being I am satisfied that the diplomatic transcription given in part II of this paper includes every feature that editors of the Bor poems also include. At the same time it goes beyond demands posed by the general reader, and calls attention to a number of features that have gone unobserved until now. It may prove instructive to compare a diplomatic transcription with the contents of the printed booklet accompanying the facsimile. To mention only one major difference: the booklet omits printing the preliminary draft of Nyolcadik ecloga ("Eighth Eclogue"), limiting notice of it to brief mention in Tibor Szántó's afterword (booklet, p. 31). One important point the booklet makes is that it would not be possible to reconstruct the texts of some of the poems in the Notebook, were it not for the existence of separate copies. They are of five of the most substantial poems: Hetedik ecloga

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