On notation that does not refine: twelve phonetic versions in a multiple edition of a 19th century Lithuanian poem
EN"Birth of mistrust" - this is how Mikhail Bakhtin, in his draft entitled The Problem of Text, has identified the revolution in the thought-processes in humanities thanks to which textual scholarship came to be. This mistrust, for centuries directed at individual stretches of text and textual variants, recently has grown to be much more total. Nowadays it also involves the doubt whether the notions of text or 'work', opus, on which the current editing practices are based do, actually, survive the new theoretical insights and caveats. In this paper, I shall attempt to contribute to the discussion concerning textual ontology, the being of text, by presenting an example, which, in my view, allows us to highlight the doubts concerning the stability and authoritativeness of the text. [Extract, p. 181].
