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The sprawling text of Gramsci's prison notebooks has been described variously as fragmentary, incomplete, cryptic (or, rather, encrypted to circumvent the attentions of the prison authorities)-descriptions that, more often than not, have served as a prelude to and a justification for reconstructing the text, filling its lacunae, or unlocking its hidden meaning. The most valuable and abiding aspects of Gramsci's text are all too easily obscured or quite simply overlooked by the impulse to tame it, normalize it, paraphrase it so as to make it conform to habitual ways of thinking. Paying attention to small things, focusing on the particular: this is the most important aspect of Gramsci's "method," which he equated with philology.
Key Words: Gramsci, Philology, Translation, Philosophy of Praxis
In May 1930, Antonio Gramsci took a fresh notebook and divided it into two sections. He planned to use at least part of the first half for a set of notes on Canto X of the Inferno and various other issues related to Dante scholarship and criticism; the second half was to be devoted to "Notes on Philosophy. Materialism and Idealism. First Series." In Notebook 4 we see Gramsci attempting, for the first time, to organize at least some of his "notes and jottings" in thematic clusters. (Notebook 4, in fact, also contains a sequence of long notes on the intellectuals and on education; for these Gramsci used the pages in the first half of the notebook that were still blank after he had composed his observations on Dante and other miscellaneous matters.) He would later make an even more extensive effort to gather (and simultaneously modify or elaborate) many of his widely scattered notes on certain topics in "special notebooks, " each one of which was dedicated to a specific subject-for example, "Americanism and Fordism" (Notebook 22), "Literary Criticism" (Notebook 23), "Journalism" (Notebook 24), "On the Margins of History. History of Subaltern Social Groups" (Notebook 23).
In spite of these and several other attempts that Gramsci made to give some semblance of order to his multidirectional and open-ended project of research, inquiry, and criticism, the body of work he produced during his incarceration remained impervious to systematization. The sprawling text of Gramsci's prison notebooks has been described variously as fragmentary, incomplete,...