An annotated selection of Antonio Gramsci's Quaderni del carcere has appeared in Danish, edited and translated by Gert Sørensen: Fængselsoptegnelser (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag, 1991). Apart from having the obvious value of making Gramsci's writings accessible to Danish-language readers, Sørensen's edition merits special attention for the innovative solution it offers to one of thorniest problems facing anyone attempting to produce a shortened version of Gramsci's text--namely, the problem of how to produce a selection of the notebooks that simultaneously retains some of the basic characteristics and chronological sequence of the fragmentary original text and condenses the voluminous materials to manageable proportions.
Sørensen's selections appear in a chronological sequence which corresponds to that found in Valentino Gerratana's Italian critical edition. This means that the passages extracted from the earlier "miscellaneous" notebooks often follow one another without any apparent connection between them, somewhat in the way they do in Gramsci's manuscript. Thus, for example, in the two selections from Notebook 5, a note on "La Romagna e la sua funzione nella storia italiana" (§55) is followed immediately by a note on "Americanismo" (§105). The selections from the later notebooks, however, are thematically coherent--a coherence that is not imposed by the editor of the anthology but, rather, reflects Gramsci's ordering of large blocks of notes in what are known as the "special notebooks."
Sørensen's anthology consists of two volumes, the second of which is devoted entirely to the critical apparatus. Besides explaining allusions to historical events, individuals, and publications, Sørensen's annotations also impart to the reader a substantial amount of information about Gramsci's method of composition, his sources, and important segments of the notebooks not included in the anthology.
Through his ingenious editorial decisions, Sørensen has demonstrated how it might be possible to produce anthological versions of the Quaderni which, while they cannot serve fully as substitutes for the integral text in its original form, nonetheless give readers a good overall sense of the salient special characteristics of the manuscript.