Textual offshoots: glosses of the modern drafts

ENInterlinear or marginalia authorial notes as peculiar textual offshoots are particularly characteristic of self-revised holographs. It is not always easy to distinguish this kind of inscriptions from textual additions, expansions, or alternative variants, i.e., “competitive revisions”, when the author did not indicate which of the variants should have priority. The discussion of manuscripts by several twentieth-century Lithuanian poets reveals illuminative editorial misapprehensions and brings us to consider the functional variety of authorial notes. When discussing such cases, we face a more general theoretical problem: how do we modernize the arrangement of textual elements in a reading text so that we may stick to the original as much as possible, without sending false signals to the reader about the nature of textual elements? Keywords: authorial note, gloss, scholia, alternative variants, translation, Lithuanian literature, manuscripts.