![]() ![]() A case in point is Toledo’s highly unlikely series of coincidences (which Has takes up in his feature): a presumed voice from the afterlife is finally revealed as no more than the voice of a guy who mistakenly knocked at your window the very same night your best friend was dueling and had promised to tell you about the after-world should he die (which he did). But, as stories unfold and ever more points of view join the scene, what had looked like the product of supernatural powers progressively finds a totally natural explanation in terms of human agents (and a good dose of chance, too). It begins in a world in which everything seems to be the work of mythical forces such as demons, evil spirits and enchantments. ![]() In Chojecki’s as well as in Potocki’s versions, the novel is a voyage of initiation of its main character, or rather a Bildungsroman, the coming-of-age story of the man of the Enlightenment. (By the way: René Radrizzani had to struggle with Chojecki’s version in order to arrive at the first complete French version, which had to wait until 1989 - at some points he, Radrizzani, was so baffled that he gave up and translated straight from Polish - while Radrizzani’s version in turn served as the original for all subsequent translations, e.g. The result was a cut and paste carnage of fragments that hardly fit together, or a masterpiece of intertextuality. Except that, of course, Chojecki’s translation was not really the translation of one single work, but a potpourri or chimera consisting of a rather arbitrary assemblage of those of Potocki’s manuscripts Chojecki could get his hands on. At the time Has shot his film, 1964, the only “full version” of the novel that existed was the 1847 Polish translation by Edmund Chojecki. ![]() None of the novel’s auto-graphic versions, however, could have served as the basis for Has’ film, since they were only unearthed in 2002, when two Potocki scholars, François Rosset and Dominique Triaire, subjected all of the known surviving materials to close scrutiny. Notably, there are three cuts of the film and, so far, three known versions of the novel. T he Manuscript Found in Saragossa, the French-written book by count Jan Potocki and the eponymous adaptation by Wojciech J. ![]()
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