Literary studies

The thirty-seventh entry is l’edizione critica, and its own example sentence hides the word that catches English readers: l’edizione critica riporta tutte le lezioni. La lezione is the classroom word, the lesson, the class, the hour of teaching — and in textual scholarship it is something else altogether. It is what a particular manuscript actually says at a particular point, one of the competing forms an editor has to choose between and then record at the foot of the page. English calls that « a reading »: an editor prints one reading and puts the rest in the apparatus. So both languages have taken a common word and given it a second, technical life, and they did not take the same word. « Lesson » stays in the classroom and in church and never means a variant; and « reading » carried back into Italian gives la lettura, which is the act of reading, or an interpretation, but never the wording of one witness. The trap is a quiet one: tutte le lezioni rendered as all the lessons makes a sort of sense, and says nothing true.