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Texts beyond Borders: Multilingualism and Textual Scholarship. The European Society for Textual Scholarship Sixth International Conference, Academy for Science and the Arts, Brussels, November 19–21, 2009

DOI 10.1515/edit.2010.016 While most authors have built their literary work in one preferential language (not necessarily their mother tongue), some writers have changed this language in the course of their life and some have composed their work in more than one language (Petrarch, Beckett, Nabokov, Pessoa, so many others). Although national ‘identity’ seems to be bound to one language and some emblematic literary works sometimes served as building blocks for such phantasmagoric identities, every (great) writer creates his or her own idiosyncratic language and tries to overcome the shortcomings of any language, since no extant language can express everything and since all attempts to create a perfect language have always failed. Despite the existence of dominant languages in Europe, which were dethroned and changed over time (Greek, Latin, French, English...), and even though some authors writing in a dominant language were sometimes deaf to other languages, one could argue that literature is by its very nature always multilingual, some texts and some authors being more multilingual than others. With this complex set of thoughts in mind, the topic for the sixth international conference of the European Society for Textual Scholarship (organized by Dirk Van Hulle and Caroline Macé) was quite challenging: how does textual scholarship respond to multilingualism in its various forms? All in all, the answers proposed by the 33 contributions to ten parallel sessions and the six plenary papers were extremely stimulating and demonstrated that the theme of ‘multilingualism’ offers an interesting point of view to look at literature. The programme of the conference was far too rich to do justice to all of the contributions in detail, but we would like to pinpoint some of the responses offered to the thoughtprovoking questions brought about by the topic of the conference. The first and the last plenary lectures, both focusing on strongly monolingual authors, whose works are the object of large international editorial projects, were mirroring each other in more than one way and can serve as the extreme landmarks at both ends of the conference. Nathalie Mauriac (ITEM, Paris) presented the new genetic edition of Marcel Proust’s manuscripts. Proust is perhaps the most iconic author of French literature; although he translated Ruskin into French, one could hardly find any trace of another language than French in his published writings. Yet, Nathalie Mauriac showed that a kind of multilingual imagination is not absent from Proust’s manuscripts: for example the inventive