The handwriting of Zaragoza

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The handwriting of Saragossa or the adventures in the Sierra Morena (in the French original Le manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse ) is a novel by Count Jan Potocki (1761-1815). The title is explained by the fact that the work in a short foreword by the "editor" masquerades as an old manuscript which the latter claims to have found during the Napoleonic Wars on the Iberian Peninsula in a dilapidated building near the Spanish city of Saragossa .

Creation and publication

The Polish aristocrat Jan Potocki, who his contemporaries knew primarily as an explorer, ethnographer and historian , is now mainly known as the author of the novel, on which he worked from around 1797 until his death in 1815. The history of the publication itself is like a novel: During Potocki's lifetime, only small editions of private prints with parts of the French text appeared. After Potocki's suicide, the complete manuscript he had sent to Paris for printing was lost and could not be found despite the research suggested by Pushkin . Several pirated prints appeared for this , so that Potocki's authorship was only known again after a court case. A complete, but unreliable Polish translation of the novel was published in 1847. Although further parts of the text have since appeared in Potocki's "handwriting", restoring the text remains a work of reconstruction: In the current French edition from 1989, around 15% of the text had to be taken from the Polish The transfer must be retranslated, while the remainder has been passed down more or less reliably in the French original.

Structure and content

Based on the example of the stories from the Arabian Nights and the narrative cycles of the Renaissance ( Giovanni Boccaccio's Decamerone , Margaret of Navarre's Heptaméron ), The Manuscript of Saragossa consists of a frame narrative in which numerous stories are embedded. The youthful (and sometimes somewhat naive) hero, Alphonse (or Alfonso) van Worden, has to cross the inhospitable Sierra Morena in the highlands of Spain , gets involved in numerous adventures, especially (apparent) haunted and ghost stories, and encounters numerous, sometimes obscure, ones , sometimes fascinating people who tell the embedded stories.

However, this is not a simple linear sequence as usual . Rather, the stories are nested in one another several times (on up to six levels!), Interrupt one another, overlap with one another, with people from one story appearing again in another, and completely undermine the seemingly simple framework principle by showing parallels between individual stories and the framework plot or both even merge. The traditional form of the frame narrative dissolves into a "kaleidoscope" ( Roger Caillois ) of stories, the exact context of which the reader only sees through at the end of the book, like a detective novel. With this unique structure, Potocki anticipates literary experiments of the 20th century, such as Franz Kafka , Jorge Luis Borges or postmodern authors.

Reception and adaptations

The novel was filmed in 1964 under the direction of Wojciech Jerzy Has in Poland as a black and white film under the same title . The main roles were played by Zbigniew Cybulski , Kazimierz Opaliński , Elżbieta Czyżewska , Iga Cembrzyńska and Joanna Jędryka. The film found many admirers among the protagonists of the 1968 movement , particularly the Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry García . The soundtrack comes from the pen of the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki .

Loosely based on the novel, the four-part television series La duchesse d'Avila was created in France in 1968 , although it was not broadcast until 1973. In 1975 the series was broadcast on GDR television under the title Adventure in the Sierra Morena .

The Italian director Alberto Rondalli adapted the novel in 2017 in a feature film entitled Agadah .

Quotes

  • “I cannot understand what madness has taken over the heads of the Catalonians; they believed they could stand up to all of Europe. ”- 60th day

Important editions of the novel (selection)

  • Manuscript trouvé à Saragosse. Edited by Roger Caillois . Paris 1958.
  • The handwriting of Zaragoza. Edited by Roger Caillois, translated by Louise Eisler-Fischer and Maryla Reifenberg. Insel, Frankfurt am Main, 1961. Licensed edition: Büchergilde Gutenberg, Frankfurt am Main 1969. Paperback edition 1975 (2 vol. With pictures by Goya): ISBN 3-458-01839-5 .
  • The handwriting of Saragossa or the adventures in the Sierra Morena. Edited by Leszek Kukulski, translated by Werner Creutziger (French) and Kurt Harrer (Polish). Structure, Berlin 1962. New editions: Haffmans, Zurich 1984, ISBN 3-251-20011-9 ; Structure, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-351-03051-7 ; Two thousand and one, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-86150-901-1 .
  • Manuscript trouvé à Saragosse. Edited by René Radrizzani. Corti, Paris 1989, ISBN 2-7143-0314-5 . New edition: Corti, Paris 1992, ISBN 2-7143-0364-1 .
  • The handwriting of Zaragoza. Translated by Manfred Zander, afterword by Karl Markus Michel. Haffmans, Zurich 2000, ISBN 3-251-20311-8 . New edition with afterword by René Radrizzani: Kein & Aber, Zurich 2003, ISBN 3-0369-5118-0 . Paperback edition: Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 2011, ISBN 978-3-596-90337-5 .

Secondary literature

  • Elzbieta Grabska-Wallis (ed.): Potocki et le manuscrit trouvé à Saragorre (Congress files ). Center de civilization française de l'université Varsovie, Warsaw 1981.
  • Jan Herman (Red.): Le manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse et ses intertextes. Actes du colloque. Peeters, Louvain 2001, ISBN 90-429-0989-7 .
  • Günter von Kirn: Potocki's “The Adventures in the Sierra Morena”. Univ.-Diss., Hannover 1982.
  • Karl Markus Michel: Around the gallows of Los Hermanos or the bad stories of Count P. In: Frankfurter Hefte 17 (1962), pp. 135-140.
  • Volker Neuhaus: Types of multi-perspective storytelling. Böhlau, Cologne 1971, ISBN 3-412-00871-0 . (contains an analysis of Potocki's storytelling technique)
  • Lena Seauve: Labyrinths of Telling. Jean Potocki's 'Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse' (= Studia Romanica; Volume 193). Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2015, ISBN 978-3-8253-6445-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jacques Baudou / Jean-Jacques Schleret: Les feuilletons historiques de la télévision française . Éditions Huitième Art, Paris 1992
  2. ↑ https://www.fernsehserien.de/ablebnis-in-der-sierra-morena