Jan Potocki - The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (Penguin Classics)

THE MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN SARAGOSSA

A Polish classic constructed like a Chinese box of tales It

reads like the most brilliant modern novel Salman Rushdie in

the Guardian

One of the great masterpieces of European literature this new

translation offers us the work as a whole in English for the first time,

in the dizzyingly elaborate form envisioned by the authors

extraordinary imagination Larry Wolff in The New York Times

Book Review

The translation by Ian Maclean is crisp, lucid and unfussy A

beautiful volume, underlining Potockis forgotten masterpiece as a

work of real substance James Woodall in The Times

A picaresque ramble through Islam and the inquisition This is

the stuff of reading on a grand scale, fiction of enduring splendour

David Hughes in the Mail on Sunday

Impossible to put down - Katherine A. Powers in the Boston Globe

A bravura translation the 100 or so stories told over 66 Days

are fantastic, ghostly, erotic, comic, ghoulish, philosophical and

Munchausenly tall - David Coward in the Sunday Telegraph

This volume is excellent value, two dozen fresh and ingenious tales

for the price of a novel - Julian Duplain in the Times

Literary Supplement

At its most magical The Manuscript Found in Saragossa reads like The

Arabian Nights , at its most italianate like something from The

Decameron a masterwork of European romanticism - Michael

Dirda in the Washington Post Book World

One of the strangest books ever written can at last take its rightful

place in world literature - Kola Krauze in the Guardian

ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR

JAN POTOCKI was born in Poland in 1761 into a very great aristocratic family, which owned vast estates. He was educated in Geneva and Lausanne, served twice in the army and spent some time as a novice Knight of Malta. During his lifetime he was an indefatigable traveller and travel-writer, an Egyptologist and pioneering ethnologist, an occultist and an historian of the pre-Slavic peoples. He was a political activist and probably a freemason, although he seems to have espoused a bafflingly wide range of political causes, some of them patriotic. Among his other exploits were an ascent in a balloon over Warsaw with the aeronaut Blanchard and the provision of the first free press in that city.

Potocki was proficient in many different languages, and his extensive travels led him through the Mediterranean, the Balkans, the Caucasus and China. He married twice (the first marriage ending in divorce) and had five children: scandalous rumours surrounded both of his marriages. In 1812 he retired to his estates in Poland, suffering from chronic ill health, melancholia and disillusionment. He committed suicide in 1815. Although the exact details of his end are uncertain, the most credible story is that he blew his brains out with a silver bullet, which was modelled from the knob of his sugar-bowl and first blessed by the castle chaplain.

IAN MACLEAN is Reader in French at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the Queens College.

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa

JAN POTOCKI

TRANSLATED BY IAN MACLEAN

PENGUIN BOOKS

in memoriam absentium

J. N. M. M. J. W. M. E. M. D. E. M. M. W. B. H.

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

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Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Private Bag 102902, NSMC, Auckland, New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

First modern edition published in French 1989

This translation first published by Viking 1995

Published in Penguin Books 1996

13

Copyright Jos Corti, 1992

This translation copyright Ian Maclean, 1995

All rights reserved

The moral right of the translator has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers

prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

which it is published and without a similar condition including this

condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

Contents

Introduction

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa is a complex interweaving of tales narrated by a young army officer called Alphonse van Worden, who kept a diary of his experiences in the Sierra Morena in 1739, recording both the events which he witnessed and the stories he was told by the company in which he found himself. In 1769 or thereabouts, his diary was sealed by him (so the story goes) in a casket; forty years later, it was found by a French officer while out looting after the fall of the city of Saragossa. He didnt know much Spanish, but he realized that what he had come upon was a story about brigands, ghosts, cabbalists, smugglers, gypsies, haunted gallows and no doubt much else besides. It was an intriguing mystery: intriguing enough to persuade him to keep the book in his possession, to attempt to hang on to it when he was captured and, later, to inveigle his captor into translating it for him. The same intriguing mystery awaits the reader of this translation: or rather the same complicated web of mysteries. The French officer of the foreword was careful not to spoil the story by revealing too much about it in his preface, and in this introduction I shall be just as discreet; but without giving away too much, I can suggest where the mysteries of the book are to be found.

There are in fact three enigmatic aspects to the book: its author, its composition and its contents. Its author, Count Jan Potocki (17611815), was a member of a very great Polish family who lived at a time of considerable literary and political turbulence throughout Europe. His life was spent in travelling, writing, political intrigue and scholarly research. He received a solid education in Geneva and Lausanne, had two spells in the army as an officer in the engineers, and spent some time on a galley as a novice Knight of Malta. He was among the first to make an ascent in a balloon (in 1790), which brought him much public acclaim; he was a tireless political activist, consorting with patriots in Poland, Jacobins in France and the court of Alexander I of Russia. He appears to have been a freemason. All this activity cannot easily be ascribed to a single set of beliefs: at certain times he applauded, at others condemned the French Revolution; he fought against the Russians yet served the Tsar, and accepted a commission to fight alongside the Austrians while declaring himself their political enemy. His travels at different periods of his life took in Italy, Sicily, Spain, Tunisia, Turkey, Egypt, France, Holland, England, Germany, Russia, even Mongolia; he wrote lively accounts of most of these journeys, and while on them engaged in historical, linguistic and ethnographical researches. His published writings helped found the discipline of ethnology. He compounded his scholarly activity with an interest in publishing, establishing an independent press in Warsaw in 1788 and a free reading room there four years later. As well as writing and publishing scholarly works and pamphlets, he wrote a play, a set of sketches (parades), and, of course, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa . He married twice, and had five children; he was divorced from his second wife in 1808. There were rumours of incest. By 1812, politically disillusioned and in poor health, he had retired to his castle at Uladwka in Podolia. On 2 December or 11 December 1815 (depending on the source), he committed suicide, although whether out of political despair, mental depression or a desire to be released from a highly painful chronic condition is not clear. Many stories are told about his death. He is said to have fashioned a silver bullet himself out of the knob of his teapot (or the handle of a sugar-bowl bequeathed to him by his mother); he had it blessed by the chaplain of the castle, and then used it to blow out his brains in his library (or his bedroom), having written his own epitaph (or, according to other sources, drawn a caricature of himself). The macabre stories about his end, his equivocal political career and personal life, his polymathy and his restless wanderings all contribute to the composite picture of an Enlightenment thinker and a romantic figure par excellence , commensurate with his one great literary work.