Footnote recipe (explanations in Dramaty by Zygmunt Krasiński)

Abstract

The article is an attempt to formulate the most important rules of writing footnotes to a scientific and popular-scientific publication. The starting point of an editor’s work in this respect should be defining the type of publication and sketching the profile of a model reader. The article presents a kind of philosophy of footnotes, which was adopted in the course of editorial work on a volume of dramas by Zygmunt Krasiński. It consists of the following guidelines:

1. Placing the explanations after the texts of dramas, in order to preserve the text’s transparency.

2. Not suggesting interpretative paths.

3. Explaining the topics which require clarification (foreign and archaic expressions, historical, religious, medical and military terms, paraphrases and references to other literary texts).

4. Simple and concise structure of the explanation (providing information necessary for understanding a given term).

5. Staying close to the context.