Between Authenticity and Accessibility: Parallel Philological Editions as a Practice of Literary Heritage Preservation

This study explores how parallel philological editions can serve as instruments for safeguarding endangered literary heritage through the preservation and transmission of Arbëresh—a historical dialect classified by the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger as “definitely endangered”. Preserved for more than six centuries by Albanian communities that settled in Southern Italy following the migrations of the late Middle Ages, Arbëresh represents an early historical form of Albanian and a significant component of Albanian linguistic and cultural heritage. By approaching this literary corpus as endangered cultural heritage, the article utilizes the 1956 parallel edition of Jeronim De Rada’s The Songs of Milosao (Këngët e Milosaos, 1836) by philologist Jup Kastrati as a primary case study. This work represents a unique case due to its extensive history of critical reproductions and scholarly analyses while concurrently serving as a generalizing model that illustrates the broader reception history of Arbëresh literature within the mother country. By examining the first critical edition of this work, the paper aims to highlight Kastrati’s balanced approach. Through the practice of a parallel edition—juxtaposing the original Arbëresh text in one column with its modern Albanian adaptation opposite—he effectively preserves the linguistic authenticity of the source text while ensuring its accessibility for contemporary audiences, thereby conceptualizing philological intervention as a process of cultural mediation between past and present. Methodologically, the research adopts a comparative and historical-philological framework, analyzing the strategies of transliteration and textual adaptation. This model not only expands the reception range of the work, but also contributes to the preservation of Arbëresh literary heritage, ensuring the communicative continuity of this tradition across contemporary generations. To fully reconstruct the academic and cultural context of the scholar’s undertaking, the analysis also draws on family archival materials and unpublished manuscripts. Finally, the study argues that parallel philological editions are not merely editorial instruments but effective mechanisms for the preservation and transmission of endangered-language and literary heritage, enabling access to historical linguistic forms while ensuring their intelligibility for contemporary readers.