Notitia hungáriae novae historico geographica (Budapest, 2012)

Előszó

14

PREFACE

We also had to face new challenges when revising and publishing the archiepiscopal copies. It is worth comparing the quality of these manuscripts with the ones prepared during Bél’s life or under Bél’s supervision. In the copies made by Bél’s scribes (e.g. Árva and Trencsén from the first volume and Sopron from this volume) there are hardly any miswritings because they worked from a well readable original and also their “master” supervised the manuscript; there are clear indications for the formatting of the text (they indicated with underlines what they want to be printed in italics or small capitals); the margin texts are ready as well as the synopses before the bigger parts, and the headers are already situated on top of the pages - consequently the manuscripts almost look like the printed version. The “archiepiscopal copies” on the other hand, as mentioned above, contain a lot of errors, the formatting was only occasionally respected, similarly to the margin texts or the headers (though it is true that sometimes the original manuscript might have been in a rudimentary state). Furthermore it is typical for the copyist Ferenc Szarka to interpolate the text in some cases, that means that he “updated” the information it contained (he changed names of officials, land owners for the ones actual in his time, but sometimes he interjected longer texts while erased other, out of date parts). We thought we could not publish the descriptions in this state, because we would thus just reproduce the work of dubious value of the archiepiscopal scribes. Therefore we paid a lot of attention to correct the large amount of errors made by the copyists, to reconstruct the original text, further to that - following the practice of the edited volumes and the manuscripts written by Bél’s scribes and revised by Bél - we supplemented the formatting of the texts (we printed in italics and small capitals the personal and geographical names and put the citations into italics) and when it was necessary, we supplied the margin texts, headers and synopses. Naturally in case of these latter we always indicated that the supplement was added by us, just as well as we always indicated the original, erroneous text when correcting text corruptions. We also made sure to identify the later supplements made by another, not Bél. It was not difficult because often the posteriority of the supplement was obvious (there are persons or events mentioned that undoubtedly date later), on the other hand, Szarka’s poor “clerk-style” Latin differs considerably from Bél’s highly elaborate style. We also have to note that in the descriptions, that subsisted in archiepiscopal transcript (Vas, Zala, Veszprém), the copyists wrote some words in a special form, following their own orthographical “principles” (e. g. sylva, hystoria, faemina, faestivus, erruo, deffluo, Bomffinius etc.); and often used the punctuation in a negligent way. The erroneous forms, which are completely differring from Bél’s orthography, were corrected by us, but we indicated the original forms in text critical notes. As for the punctuation, we tacitly corrected or supplied it according to Bél’s practice.

The new challenges and the characteristics of the texts made new technical solutions necessary. The explanatory notes are indicated by Roman numbers (i, ii, iii. etc.) instead of asterisks (*). It was necessary because the complex text critical problems required several explanatory notes and 6-7 notes on the same page can be better indicated this way than with asterisks that can be confused at the larger numbers (*, **, ***, but then: *4, *5 etc.) with the text critical notes indicated by Arabic numbers. There are drawings in the descriptions of Vas and Zala county that the scribe (Szarka) had undoubtedly copied from the original manuscript, therefore we decided to publish them. We placed and sized them as they were found in the original manuscripts. The description of Veszprém county copied by Szarka abounds in errors. It was partly the reason why we collated the manuscript by Szarka with the above mentioned early draft prepared by János

With all certainty dominarentur had been found in the original text as Bél uses this verb below in the same context (“...qui in Comitatu Castriferrei late dominabantur...” See in our edition on page 306.) The sentence was corrected accordingly by us (see p. 291. of the present edition). The translation based on the corrected text: “Therefore it is easy to imagine that they (namely the Kőszegis) were upset, that while they were widely dominating the whole area, the mount Güssen, that would have been convenient for building a strong castle on, was possessed by the monks and fortified more than a monastery would usually be.” The translator Irma Szálka, however, translated the sentence as follows: “It was well known that they had used the opportunity and while they had to fear far and wide the whole area, to take

[!] the mount Kűszin with the monastery turned into fort from the monks, for the purpose of a very strong castle.” See Bél 1976-1977. Part II. 248. As seen above the translator tried to translate the text with the corruptions (usisse, minarentur) - transgressing grammatical rules - but she made other errors as well and on top of all, the Hungarian sentence does not make any sense. This sort of translation does not substitute the lack of a critical edition, not even for the Hungarian reader.