Colloquia Maruliana, Vol. 15 , 2006.
Original scientific paper
Some Differences among Known Manuscripts of Marulić’s Naslidovanje / Imitation of Christ
Dragica Malić
Abstract
The author was induced to compare the two known manuscripts of Marulić’s Imitation (from Zadar and from London) by a more or less fortuitously read history of art text in which London is attributed to Marulić’s own hand, which was also supposed to be responsible for the caricatures inside the initials, which would make Marulić the first Croatian caricaturist. Intrigued with this item, according to which London would put into our hands an addition to the few autographs known, and the only text in Croatian to boot, which would be particularly important for the establishment of Marulić’s graphic system and his employment of spelling principles, the author searched the said MS (actually, a copy of it) and easily determined that this was just one more fallacy in which Marulić was attributed what did not pertain to him, of the kind earlier encountered in her investigations. But being in possession of the said manuscript, she set out on a comparison of it with the other known transcription of the same work, the Zadar MS. Unlike London, which contains just a third of the work, Zadar is almost complete, and in the literature it is considered an older and more immediate copy, closer in time to Marulić’s autograph. Zadar still keeps its temporal edge over London, but there search carried out puts it a little further away from Marulić’s original, which is confirmed by the statement of the well known palaeographer Jakov Stipišić, who would make both manuscripts considerably more recent than the time that later researchers put them in.
Starting out from the differences in the actual title of the work, which belong to different levels of language, from the graphic to the lexical, which is also the most patent, Od naslidovanja Isukarstova - Od naslidovanja Isukarsta, the author wondered which of the differences observed belonged to Marulić’s translatorly approaches. Without entering into the minutiae of the differences observed, especially not those at the graphic and orthographic levels, this article is aimed at showing the existing problems and the difficulties in determining the priority of Marulić’s texts that they cause. And this opens up the more general problem of determining the author’s or translator’s original solutions on occasions when the reare two or more copies or editions of an old text. Since the basic inducement to this paper was to indicate something of the problem rather than to settle it, the analysis is based on a limited section of the text, to the first 15 chapters. The material is classified per level, from graphic and orthographic to lexical. We may return here to the title. Apart from the already stated difference between Isukarstova and Isukarsta, which belongs not only to the lexical but also the syntactical level (adjective : noun, possessive adjective : possessive genitive), the title also contains graphic (palaeographic form and choice of graphemes) and orthographic (upper and lower cases) and vocal differences:
Ger⌠ena - ger⌠ona, cancilira - cancelira, Isuchar⌠toua - isuchar⌠ta Both of the transcribers (for it is a matter of transcribers) deploy more or less the samegraphic inventory and apply it in similar but not mainly the same situations, as for example: odasfache - oda⌠uache, sue . . . suetih - sfe . . . ⌠uetih, od ⌠uetoga Troistua - od sfetoga troi⌠tua and so on. And although the graphic and orthographic level is characteristic of the transcribers and hence from the copy we cannot study Marulić’s or in general any authorial graphy and grammar, sometimes it does have a reflection on the meaning of the text. In the section of the text considered, two such phenomena were discovered. Thus po narau suom and unarau glutskomu in Z should clearly be read u/po narav[u], the more so that L in appropriate placeshas naravuu [naravu]. This means that the transcriber of Z understood the original graphy of uu or vu as the onetime grapheme uu = v, and in such places syntactically in harmonious sentences were created. The second example is the graphy magnu in both mss (and in two more places of the further text of Z: magna), which previous publishers of the text have read as manu (and then: mana, i. e. , the comparative). In adequate places in the Latin original the word is manna (a noun). It can be assumed that Marulić wrote the word with a Latin graphy, i. e. , manna, mannu, and the transcriber understood the nn as a grapheme for n, which has confirmation in older Croatian Latin script. Such a graphic interpretation led to a meaningless sentence in the given cases.
The second problem lies in linguistic differences, as in for example at the voicing level: nadstaviti - nadastaviti (non-voiced or voiced vowel at the compound border), ne imiju - ne imaju / nemaju (?) (different gradational basis), vikomnoj - vikovnoj (consonantal change); at the morphological: stvari - stvareh, oči tvoje - oči tvoji, lutskomu - lutskom, nerazborna - nerazbornoga, harlije -harle, porazuju - porazivaju, toliko ćeš teže biti osujen - toliko hoćet (!) teže. . . (enclitic - full forms of auxiliary); bude ti - budet (domestic - Church Slavonic form of the 3rd person singular present); at the word formation level: slipoće -slipote (different suffixes), zgodna - ugodna (different prefixes); at the syntactic: čano korisno jest - čano jest korisno, mnogo veće stvari jest ke ne znaš - mnogo veće stvari ke ne znaš jest (different word order); at the lexical: . . . mnozi radi česta slušanja Evanjelja malo ćute svetoga želinja - . . . radi česta služenja. . . , veće spovidaj tvoj nerazum - . . . spominaj toj. . . , parvo - pravo, prigine – prigne and so on. Many of the differences between these two mss are the consequence of carelessness and negligence, perhaps of a damaged original, lack of understanding. During the analysis it was found that there are more such errors in London than in Zadar. Comparisons with the Latin original show that that Zadar often has better translations, whether in terms of faithfulness to the original, or in the use of language approaches more characteristic of or literarily more common in Croatian. London, it would seem, occasionally looks for a conscious simplification of some translation approaches, or for convergence with the native milieu, in connection with which one can notice certain traces of Old Church Slavonic or at least of someolder literary language practice and more pronounced Chakavian features as com pared with the quite frequent Shtokavian features of Zadar. Having these dualities at our disposal, we might wonder which version of the two is actually Marulić’s. This article does not aim to register all the differences in the mss of the Naslidovan’je (hence the analysis is restricted just to a smaller section), but only to indicate the problem of their existence, at all levels, from the graphic and orthographic to the grammatical and lexical. And it has to be decided that the Zadar MS, which for the remaining two thirds of the text (not recorded in London) is anyway the only resource, is more reliable in translation and transcription and is probably closer to the Marulić original.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
2809
URI
Publication date:
22.4.2006.
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