A dispute over the “letter” or something more? On the margins of “Tęcza” by Norwid (on the ninetieth anniversary of the beginning of the controversy)

Abstract

The year 2024 marks 90 years since the beginning of the “dispute” about the accuracy of the word “szczęty” reading in Norwid’s poem Tęcza, which in the edition following the first printing was replaced with the word “szczyty”. Ultimately, the dispute over the correctness of emendation is not primarily about the “letter”, or even about the word or the line; not only about whether the poet used the word “szczęty” or “szczyty” there, as Juliusz Wiktor Gomulicki decided and repeated many times in his editions, contrary to the first edition and the critical opinion of Konrad Górski. In the absence of an autograph, both versions are textological hypotheses. The question is which of them is “stronger”. At this point, however, we leave the purely textological field and enter the area of responsibility of the textologist-editor for disseminating the author’s version.