A tinta não é permanente. (Filologia e Arquivística)

Fountain pens – Montblanc or others – promise texts a more extended span of life than other writing tools. Texts crafted by chalk, pencil, ballpoint or felt, even by digital means, are not assured of a similar durability; although for different reasons, the same could be said of those inlaid in digital machines. But nothing, not even ink texts, is assured of lasting permanently. Troves of long-living manuscripts abound in our archives and libraries, especially since scholars' taste evolved from the preference for the 'optimi' to a wider range of functions and meanings discovered in manuscripts which, until Goethe, were meant to be discarded and replaced by their fair-copies. Archives now keep not only the final form of the text, the 'imprimandum', but also the drafts where inceptive notions, aborted trials, mistakes and misgivings, even sudden inspirations, lurk in wait to tell the tale of the writing process, including crucially what the writer intended us not to read. Without archives and libraries full of such ancillary, but well-inked, manuscripts the kind of research that goes by the name of 'critique génétique' probably would not have raised its head. To show how fruitful the alliance between archival endeavour and modern philology can be, even for the study of non-literary texts, a chapter of Leite de Vasconcelos' Esquisse d'une Dialectologie Portugaise is scanned in its five successive writing stages.