Wednesday 22 February - Gillian Pink (St John's College, Oxford & Voltaire Foundation)

Devil in the Details: Preparing a Critical Edition of Voltaire’s Pauvre Diable

17.00-18.30
New Seminar Room, St John's College
Wine and Nibbles provided

Paper and Discussion

Gillian’s paper took us through the various stages of preparing a critical edition of Voltaire’s poem, Le Pauvre Diable, first published under a pseudonym in 1760 but antedated to 1758 to distance it from the polemics and controversies of the period. Gillian provided a detailed account of the mechanics behind the preparation of critical editions, from the initial stages of deciding on which version of the text to choose to the process of modernising spelling and punctuation. She argued for the importance of including variant readings from both authorised and unauthorised versions of the text in circulation at the time. She demonstrated how to describe an eighteenth-century printed volume in all its material detail using a bibliographical ‘short-hand’ and also talked us through the role and characteristics of an editor's introduction (neutrality, factuality, objectivity). 

A very enthusiastic and dynamic discussion followed with questions about the history of the Voltaire Foundation, its ‘house style’, the role of critical editions in the academic world, their target audience and whether there is a difference between French and English practices. The discussion moved on to the importance of the material, physical nature of the text in interpretation and the possible interpretative role involved in glossing allusions (and how far this should be taken), with questions about Voltaire’s library, correspondence, ‘diaries’ and the stakes surrounding posthumous publication. Thanks so much to Gillian for such an interesting and clear paper, and to this session's attendees for their participation and commitment.

Abstract

As literary scholars, we all use critical editions in our work, but how closely do we examine the principles according to which they were prepared? Do we ask ourselves what has been included and what has been left out? If there are several versions of the text, which has been chosen (and why?) and to what extent does the edition allow us insight into the alternative versions? Is the presentation historical and objective or might the editor be using the platform of the critical edition to promote a controversial new interpretation of the work? These are some of the questions that will be discussed in this seminar, using as a case study Gillian Pink's recently completed critical edition of Voltaire's 1760 poem Le Pauvre Diable for the ongoing Œuvres complètes de Voltaire (Oxford, 1968- ).

Gillian Pink, Research Editor with the Œuvres complètes de Voltaire project (Voltaire Foundation, Oxford) since 2007, is publishing manager and in-house editor of the ongoing sub-series, the Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (ed. N. Cronk and C. Mervaud) and the Corpus des notes marginales (ed. N. Elaguina et al.). She is also preparing a D.Phil. on Voltaire’s marginalia: Les Pratiques de lecture chez Voltaire. Avec une édition critique de notes marginales inédites (St John’s College, Oxford). Before working on Voltaire she lectured in French and literary translation at St Francis Xavier University (Canada), and recently published the French translation of Hermia Oliver’s 1980 monograph, Flaubert et une gouvernante anglaise (PURH, 2010). She has published a number of critical editions of eighteenth-century texts, mostly by Voltaire, and is interested in initiatives to bring the activity of scholarly editing into the digital sphere.