Ioan Budai-Deleanu, at times within an unfaithful reading
Ioan Budai-Deleanu is one of the most important Romanian writers of all times. His fundamental work, Ţiganiada, is a writing of a European value, owing to the use of some formulas, prosodic methods and famous themes from ancient and medieval literature. Ioan Budai-Deleanu has founded the literature of imagology in Romanian culture. Psychologically, sometimes it modelled upon a farcical humour, but, fundamentally, it was a humour of a constructive essence, whose value would be equaled much later, in Ion Luca Caragiale’s well-known writing.
The present article reveals just a few of the most significant mistakes that the authors of the edition, Gheorghe Chivu and Eugen Pavel, have done while working. Exceedingly regrettable are those from Ţiganiada, which has more than twenty editions so far. Despite this experience, after almost a century and a half since the first edition, the poem has been drowned by linguistic errors, which have degraded the authors’ achievement.
Keywords: Ioan Budai-Deleanu, transcribed text, manuscript, linguistic errors, edition
