Academic Situation

OK.  You asked for it.  I'll try to make this as interesting and painless as possible.

I'm here in Pamplona on an exchange fellowship that partners my department (Romance Languages at UNC-Chapel Hill), with the School of Philosophy and Letters here at the University of Navarra.  The exchange is meant to give people in my situation (that is, done with courses and ready to write their dissertation) an opportunity to do research in Spain, with one of the finest research teams in the world, GRISO, a group that does a tremendous amount of work on Spanish literature of the Golden Age (16th and 17th centuries, the period of Don Quijote, for example).  I get to do research and get paid, and they get my assistance in return.  I mostly do work for the Modern Languages Department, who need me for my (alleged) skills in English.  I've taught a few classes on American literature (don't laugh), and I have created and maintain their website.

I came here with the idea that I would use this time (time, a comodity that is sorely lacking to me in Chapel Hill) to find and begin work on a dissertation topic.  I'm getting there.

While I didn't have a concrete idea of what I might study, I was fairly certain that I wanted to write an edition of a work from the medieval period (roughly 1000-1500 AD, in the case of Spain), most likely from the 14th or 15th century.  An edition, in philological terms, is a publication which puts into modern print a work of writing that was written either in manuscript form or in an early form of print that is difficult to read or reproduce.  Philologists have been working on editing all of the early Spanish literature, a considerable volume, for the past two centuries, and they continue to do so, sometimes re-editing an edition that was in some deficient or flawed.  In all cases, the philologist must rely largely on the original manuscript or print copy to do his/her work, examining obscured portions of the text or verifying the judgments of other editors.

But a good edition is not merely a transcription of a manuscript.  Because of the ages that have passed since the composition of these works, an editor must also provide an introductory study that will help the reader understand the meaning of the text, its place the history of literature, culture and language, and issues of the edition process.  Editions will typically include a glossary of some sort as well, because of the differences between the old and modern languages, and may also offer a linguistic study of the text.  There are varying styles and "levels" of edition, depending on the needs of the text, the intended readship and the specialty of the editor.

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An edition is what I wanted to do.  What I didn't know at first was whether I could find something to edit, i.e. something UN-edited, or what kind of text I might find.  Nor did I know the first thing about finding one.  "Find" is a misleading word.  Really, all of the books that have physically survived to our time have been found and are now housed in the special archives of the major libraries of Spain and Europe.  There could be a handful of undiscovered manuscripts buried in old libraries and who-knows-where, but finding a text to edit is a matter of digging through catalogs and talking to colleagues and not really "digging in the dirt."  The most important literary material that survives from the Middle Ages is nearly all edited, so finding a good text that's still in need of its very first edition - that's the greatest coup possible.  I thought I had one.

When I began my search, my director in Pamplona gave me a tip on something that seemed to have never been edited.  The Genealogia Deorum Gentilium (Genealogy of the Pagan Gods), a work written in Latin by the Italian Giovanni Boccaccio in the 14th century and then translated to Spanish in 15th.  The translated text survives in 4 main manuscipts, all located in Madrid, from which I would have to create a unified, definitive version.  I actually made a trip to Madrid in October and examined two of the more intact manuscripts.  My transciption would be many hundreds of typed pages, so while I was glad to have material, it looked awfully nasty.  In fact, I was only mildly disappointed when, at the end of November, my director came back from a trip to Madrid with the news that in fact, an edition had been written as a dissertation in Madrid 7 years ago but never published.  Now, there's nothing that says you can't write an edition when one is already done, but it would mean having to work with the other edition and step around what's been said in it.  And it's not as though I loved this book...  So, back to the drawing board.

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After poking around at other possibilities, somewhat blindly, and finding nothing as promising as the Genealogia, I got help from a scholar friend of my advisor in Chapel Hill.  He gave me a long list of possible texts to edit, most of which looked at least possible, and even interesting.  He was pushing for one text in particular, the Fazienda de Ultra Mar (a beautiful title that simply does not translate well), which is an extremely early (perhaps 12th century) translation of some portions of the Old Testament into Spanish directly from the Hebrew text of the Bible, rather than from the Latin Vulgate Bible of Saint Jerome.  The task would be immense.  Not only is the text long, but the textual and linguistic issues it carries are mind-numbingly complex.  But I was ready to dive in.  To do such an edition would make me an international superstar overnight (OK, among the nerds in my field).  I was warned that it could take me at least 2 years to complete it, and Jisook and I were ready for that.  Then came the show-stopper.  An old and renowned professor of historical linguistics at U Navarra got wind of what I was contemplating, and his reaction was "What is he thinking getting involved in the Fazienda?!?  Tell him to forget it."  That's what he told my advisor, so it was back to square one again.  You can't ignore that kind of advice.

P R E S E N T     T I M E

In the end it was I who found my terrain.  Well, it came as a suggestion from my advisor's friend, but a little further probing on my part revealed a text that had been edited recently but was badly in need of a new edition.  Two reviews of the edition were harshly critical of its many defects: missing passages, mistakes, etc.  What's more, the work is in need of a linguistic study.  But perhaps the most encouraging fact is that it is very short and found in just one manuscript, which means that that work of transcription will be greatly reduced.  I think I will be able to handle this one.

You are wondering now why I don't just tell you what it is called and what it's about.  Well, for a number of professional reasons, I prefer to hold my tongue for the moment about the text until I am well on the way toward writing the edition.  I will reveal this much: it is a 14th-century translation of a story written in Old French verse.  If you want more details, ask me by e-mail.

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