Translations of the novel from the French rely, for the missing sections, on Chojecki's Polish translation. The first integral French-language version of the work, based on several French-language manuscripts and on Chojecki's 1847 Polish translation, was edited by René Radrizzani and published in 1989 by the renowned French publishing house of José Corti. Sections of the original French-language manuscripts were later lost, but have been back-translated into French from a Polish translation that had been made in 1847 by Edmund Chojecki from a complete French-language copy, now lost. Potocki composed the book entirely in French. The novel was written incrementally and was left in its final form-though never exactly completed-at the time of the author's suicide in 1815. The first "days" of The Manuscript Found in Saragossa were initially published apart from the rest of the novel in 1805, while the stories comprising the Gypsy chief's tale were added later.
Because of its rich and varied interlocking structure, the novel echoes favorable comparison to many celebrated literary antecedents such as the ancient BCE Jatakas and Panchatantra as well as the medieval Arabian Nights and Decameron. The novel's stories-within-stories sometimes reach several levels of depth, and characters and themes - a few prominent themes being honor, disguise, metamorphosis and conspiracy - recur and change shape throughout. The stories cover a wide range of genres and subjects, including the gothic, the picaresque, the erotic, the historical, the moral and the philosophic and as a whole, the novel reflects Potocki's far-ranging interests, especially his deep fascination with secret societies, the supernatural and " Oriental" cultures. Eventually the narrative focus moves again toward van Worden's frame story and a conspiracy involving an underground Muslim society, revealing the connections and correspondences between the hundred or so stories told over the novel's sixty-six days. The bulk of the stories revolve around the Gypsy chief Avadoro, whose story becomes a frame story itself. Recounted to the narrator over the course of sixty-six days, the novel's stories quickly overshadow van Worden's frame story. But always remember that Before the Crying of Lot 49 and the Illuminatus Trilogy, there was a spiraling Eighteenth century Polish-French literary mystery called The Saragossa Manuscript.The Manuscript Found in Saragossa collects intertwining stories, all of them set in whole or in part in Spain, with a large and colorful cast of Romani, thieves, inquisitors, a cabbalist, a geometer, the cabbalist's beautiful sister, two Moorish princesses (Emina and Zubeida) and others that the brave, perhaps foolhardy, Walloon Guard Alphonse van Worden meets, imagines or reads about in the Sierra Morena mountains of 18th-century Spain while en route to Madrid. Surely, Potocki was a student of Chaucer, Boccaccio and The Book of the Thousand and One Nights, if not of the eleventh-century Sanskrit epic The Ocean of Story. It is literature sans frontières, like an Escher staircase that doesnt conclude but doesnt circle in on itself either, or a Gödelian theorem whose paradoxes reside not within contradictory self-categorizations, but in the inability to quantify something, like an electrons scramble, that will not stop happening. It is its infinite-jest nature to elude ideological capture as something to be explicated and boxed. If it is not in fact the only book we know that never endson the page, and in real time, its subterranean career spiraling out even as we speakit is surely the single book that could be defined in its every aspect by its never-ending-ness. At the same timeall this timeit is itself such a secret history, a litany of alternate universes that runs beneath the surface of human life like long-abandoned sewer canals you can escape into, leading to the sea.
Its a book that exists in its own secret history, occupying a hidden timeline the way toys, in childrens tales, are thought to run clandestine governments when the nursery door is closed. Its a dream of reading, a dream of storytelling.
The Saragossa Manuscript isnt merely a book, a three-winded-sheets black river of blarney occupied by ghosts, bandits, compromised noblemen, banshees, nymphs, Inquisitors, logorrheics, sheikhs, clergy, philosophers, torturers, gypsies, cabalists, and infidels, most of whom masquerade as someone else at least once.
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