Introduction

The project

Bernard Comment, "En mer" is a prototype of a scholarly digital edition with a focus on the genetic paper and digital materials. The aim of the prototype is to test the affordances of a scholarly edition that engages with the hybrid nature of the avant-texte.

A paper about this project is presented at the AIUCD 2023 Conference.

The author

Bernard Comment is a Swiss author, translator and publisher, mostly active in the French literary and cultural scenes (Éditions du Seuil, France Culture, Centre national du livre, Arte). His archive is preserved at the Swiss Literary Archives (SLA) / Archives littéraires suisse (ALS).

The text

The short story "En mer" was first conceived for the radio, commissioned by the Swiss RSR Espace 2 station in 1998 as a candidate to the fracophone Prix Gilson-Fiction. The author reworked the story for its publication in La Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF) the next year and included it in various writing projects during the first decade of the 2000's. A new version of "En mer" is published in Tout passe (éd. Christian Bourgois, Paris, 2011), winner of the Prix Goncourt de la Nouvelle.

The story revolves around the topics of love and of a real or imaginary threat. Two ex-lovers meet after ten years: Léo, who now lives at sea as guardian of a cargo wreck, and Louise, who seeks refuge with him from the dramatic experience in an underground bunker. They had something in common that is lost forever.

The various versions of the short story provide slight variations to the tone and the plot.

Already in the 1999 version for the NRF, the text included a reference to Operation Ant, carried out in 1987 to test the emergency scenario in which 20'000 people should have been sheltered in an underground tunnel under the city of Lucerne. This civilian bunker still exists today, but the emergency plan has been downsized to 2'000 people. The documentation preserved in the Swiss Literary Archives for the period 2006-2009, in which Comment considered expanding the short story into a novel, includes newspaper cuts and webpages printouts about ships, the avian flu, birds, the discrimination and persecution of Jews.

The prototype

This prototype describes all the known witnesses of "En mer" and it provides transcriptions of selected passages. The materials collected here are not enough for a comprehensive study of the genesis of "En mer".

The prototype mixes text in English (especially for the editorial work) and French (Comment's text and most of what comes from the Swiss Literary Archives).

Known issues

Some issues that emerged in working with the digital witnesses are

• granularity of the archive catalogue, difficulty of finding contents, lack of identifiers;
• limited metadata, available only upon request;
• what to use as facsimile, which role;
• manuscript description: identification, physical description
• TEI encoding of the text: regular mechanisms of TEI customisation

The Italian translation

The archive contains witnesses of the Italian version of the story translated by Sandra Teroni, published in Tutto passa (Sellerio, 2012). The related materials in the archive are at least: the paper document ALS-Comment-C-2-b-15, and the digital documents 'sellerio in mare.rtf' and 'belli mare.rtf' in the directory 'Textes traduits en italien' (both last modified in 2007, before the composition of Tout passe). These witnesses have not been included in the prototype.