Kytice – Erben Karel Jaromír (2025)

The critical hybrid edition makes texts of modern Czech literature accessible, combining a book publication with a scientific digital edition (the first three volumes were published on DVD, and currently, digital editions are gradually being made available online). The fifth volume of KHE presents a new critical edition of the poetry collection Kytice by Karel Jaromír Erben (1811–1870), which was first published in 1853. Although Erben's collection has been published in Czech more than two hundred times, the original form established by the poet in the second (1861) and third editions (1871) was respected by only eight other editions of the collection, and it was last edited in this fully authentic form in 1948. The present book edition returns to the arrangement of the book as last prepared by the author, presenting a newly established text based on thorough research of textual sources after several decades. It is based on a comparison of all relevant manuscript and printed magazine and book versions. Subsequently, the critically verified text has been orthographically updated with a new claim to systematicity while striving to preserve all sound or semantic qualities of the original Erben text. The book includes a commentary summarizing...