IN THE MIDST

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Original Source:

The Baroness' poems and papers are contained in the Archives and Manuscripts Department at the University of Maryland Libraries. Complete papers cover the period from 1917-1933 and consist of manuscripts, drafts, notes, correspondence, drawings and photographs.

Textual transcription and analysis of the seven poems encoded here were undertaken in Fall 2003 by graduate students in William H. Sherman 's English 601 class, "Literary Research and Critical Contexts."

Text editing of "In the Midst" was performed by Alice Ko .

Witness A: ^GIVINGTO PERMIT ON BOARD SHIP TO VOMIT ()
Witness B: IN THE MIDST ()
Witness C: IN THE MIDST () ()

Textual Notes: There are three versions of this poem. As thought by the editor, Version A seems to be the first draft and Version C appears to be the last. Version A is not properly titled "In the Midst," but rather incorporates a line later appearing in the poem; "To Permit on Ship to Vomit." The poem and its variations are undated and previously unpublished.

The following is an excerpt from Alice Ko's transcription rationale:

The process of creating a “scholarly” edition of one of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s poems was truly a challenge. To be honest, simply deciding what kind of edition to create was one of the hardest parts of the whole experience. Flipping through Greetham’s Textual Scholarship was not overly helpful, since he has a tendency to focus on texts that come in fancy scripts and old variants of the English language – creating a parallel old and modern English spelling edition clearly was not an option; likewise, the differences in various versions of the poem were not substantial enough to warrant a parallel-text edition. I made a brief foray into the world of genetic editing, but soon realized that my grasp of editorial marks and conventions was far too limited to even begin to try to relate the various levels of the Baroness’s editing processes in a single document (without rendering the entire document unreadable). Once I had made the decision to take a hybrid approach (combining a genetic presentation of transcriptions with a clear-text version of the poem with an inclusive text apparatus), then I had to deal with all the other issues that came with the task, such as capitalization, font effects, and how to present things in a textual apparatus.

Read Alice Ko's essay "On Editing the Baroness’s 'In the Midst'."

Additions appear in a green, fixed-width font. Deletions appear in a red, fixed-width font with strikethrough.

Electronic Edition Information
Encoded by Scott Prouty
All annotations by Ko, Alice except those explicitly prefaced with "Encoder's Note."

Published by Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries

Researchers can gain access to the Papers of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in the Maryland Room, Hornbake Library, University of Maryland Libraries, College Park, MD 20742

"In the Midst" manuscripts located in Series III, Box 2, Folder 50; microfiche id numbers 4/338-4/343.

Special Collections at the University of Maryland provides more information about the microfilm edition of the papers.

Images and manuscripts drafts of this poem may not be reproduced or downloaded and used on another site without the explicit permission of UMD Archives. They may not be reproduced or downloaded and used on another site without the explicit permission of UMD Archives. Though the intellectual property of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is in the public domain, all annotations and editorial commentary are copyrighted.

2004Encoding Principles

DTD constructed from TEI poetry base with tagsets for linking, figures, analysis, transcr, textcrit.

The image and note viewer may be dragged anywhere within the browser window. It is closed by clicking on the X button. Only one image and one popup note can be viewed at a time.

Because of a limitation in the way the browser handles XSLT transformations, users of Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers cannot view images within untransformed XML documents. In order to view manuscript images in Firefox, it is recommended that readers use HTML versions of the text. This restriction applies only to the image viewer: the note viewer work across all browsers.

Each witness functions independently of each other. The first two witnesses are opened in the VM by default and displayed according to the order established by the editor/encoder. Users can open further witnesses through the Display New Version button. Witnesses can then be displayed in any order via the pull down menu. The X button removes the current version and resizes the remaining versions to maximize available space. All but one version can be removed.

The Display Notes menu provides three choices for viewing notes when viewing texts encoded using the parallel segmentation method, and two when viewing texts encoded as discrete witnesses. In both cases, the default displays notes in a JavaScript popup whenever the reader clicks upon the footnote icons. When viewing parallel segmentation-encoded texts in Internet Explorer and Firefox, there is also the option to display all notes simultaneously within an inline panel. Lastly, there is an option to hide all notes.

The Show Line Numbers checkbox toggles the display of line numbers on and off. Proper display of line numbers depends upon the TEI encoding of the document. This option is only available for documents that have been encoding using the parallel segmentation method.

To track the changes in a line across witnesses, click the line number before the start of the line. To remove the bolding, click the line number again.