Colloquia Maruliana ..., Vol. 12 , 2003.
Izvorni znanstveni članak
Marulić's Latin Paratexts
Gorana Stepanić
Sažetak
Paratexts, or liminal texts, are auxiliary texts that go with and surround the main text, lead into it, frame it and introduce it, comment on it and provide for and direct its reception. The following kinds of texts are counted as paratexts: the title of the work; data about the publisher and printer, year and place of publication; the dedication, the index, the author’s introduction; the running heads; the glosses; sub-titles; the brief contents of each chapter of book; various kinds of epilogue; final prayers and valedictory formulae; various small poetic texts, epigrams and other independent verse forms; the publisher’s recommendation to the reader, the preface and afterword; the publication data; the errata. Paratexts can be situated before, within and after the main text.
The concept “Marulić’s Latin paratexts” includes the generically heterogeneous Latin texts, prose and poetic, printed in the editions of Marulić’s Latin works. It includes texts of the author himself, printed inside his own editions or in other people’s works (for example the Letter of the Young Marko Marulić to Juraj Šižgorić), as well as texts of other authors that entered into the production of the various editions of Marulić’s texts.
The repertoire of paratexts to be printed with the main text is changeable. Since the paratexts are there for the use of the reader, or to bolster the reception of the work, editors change them according to their judgement of the nature of the reception market. The same paratexts can be shifted around in various editions of the same work; they can stay alongside parent text and move with it from edition to edition; they can vanish; sometimes they achieve independence and are printed in separate editions. The same paratext can appear in connection with two very different texts; it is possible that alongside a given text new paratexts will appear. In the editions of Marulić’s works it is possible to identify each one of such changes.
Change in the paratext repertoire is perhaps most evident to do with the title. A work that we today know by the radically abbreviated title De institutione was sold under various different titles, with very different connotations, then, as a book of recipes for a blessed life (De institutione bene beateque vivendi) or as a collec-tion of wise saws and memorable works (Dictorum factorumque memorabilium). In time the audience changes, and with it the editions; the paratexts, hence the titles, need adapting. It was the characteristic of the old titles to more or less identify the genre of the work and thus provide the purchasers better information about what the book could give them.
In principle, the more important and bigger texts have a larger number of paratexts, which is visible in the table given in the appendix to the paper. Ac-cording to its being furnished with accompanying texts, the Venetian edition of the Evangelistary of 1516 is in the lead; its opulent presentation shows, of course,
the importance of the work, and also the care of the publisher, who took care that the first edition of the Evangelistary should be reader-oriented.
The paratexts that have stood the test of time best are the epistolary dedications, a highly conventional genre that was established in Roman literature as soon as the early Empire. The epistolary dedication is an open letter, an introductory letter with the formal features of the letter; its addressee is an actual individual, but the contents are available to everyone. The text of the epistolary dedication is highly formalised; some of the most frequent contents are: the cause of the writing of the letter, a short inventory of the contents, justification of the selection of the topic, an evaluation of the benefits of the work, a statement of the writer’s mod-els, a rejection of antique models and a stress on the advantages of Christianity. The author’s attitude towards the addressee can also be deduced from the dedication, as well as important information about the author and the circumstances of the creation of his works and the editions of them.
Marulić’s epistolary dedications include a rich inventory of commonplaces of the kind used in Latin epistolary forewords and epistles since late antiquity. The most frequent of these commonplaces are: love of the author for the addressee, the threats of malicious critics, from whom the author will be protected by the addressee; the metaphorical presentation of the work of literature; mention of the author’s modesty and perseverance in his modest origins, ascription of his virtues to God, and the shortcomings to himself, references to the work in the diminutive, stress upon his own failings as writer. The topics of Marulić’s Latin epistles manifest a fair degree of system, which shows that Marulić was a learned heir of a long tradition of Latin prose epistolary dedications, the tradition that created the commonplaces that the author made use of.
Scholarship has identified the paratexts as a source of valuable information, as well as a document of the author’s awareness of his own texts, his links with other authors, and his connections with the publication network. The poetics of the paratexts, which is usually supraindividual, shows, sometimes more frequently than the poetics of the main text, how successfully the author fitted into the cur-rents of contemporary literary production.
Ključne riječi
Hrčak ID:
7966
URI
Datum izdavanja:
22.4.2003.
Posjeta: 2.395 *