Written in French by a Polish aristocrat anywhere between 1797 and 1815, and then translated into Polish by Jan Chojecki in 1847, its original version was lost; when it finally enjoyed a comeback into French (?) literature in 1989, the missing parts of the original had to be retranslated back into French. Observe the numerous transformations of the initial idea of the novel: a Pole writes in French, another translates it into Polish, yet another translates (some of) it back into French. Then a Polish writer adapts the text into a film script; then the script is turned into another medium, that of a movie, by a Polish director and Polish actors (although a Frenchman was initially cast in the part of Alphonse); and, finally and for your convenience, an anonymous (and atrocious)) translator added English subtitles to a video version of a cinema film. One should also not forget the recent and excellent English translation by Ian Maclean, which appeared as The Manuscript Found in Saragossa in 1995.

This mind-boggling series would have certainly pleased the man responsible for its existence, Jan Potocki (1761-1815), patriot and renegade, freemason and scion of Poland's top aristocracy, traveler and recluse, scientist and occultist. His life was as flamboyant as his death: he committed suicide at the age of 54, blowing his brains out with a silver bullet, melted from a part of his favorite sugar-box and blessed for the purpose by that strange man's chaplain.

It is always a risky venture to decipher a sweeping and/or uniform message from a work such as Potocki's, written so obviously for the main purpose of its author's egoistic pleasure. In fact, one has the distinct feeling that the ghost of the author must be laughing at the critical disputes aroused by the novel's modern success. Critics have read into Potocki's text both a rejection and an affirmation of Enlightenment; they have seen The Manuscript as both a popular and a sophisticated novel; they have pointed it out as both a typically French production and as an obvious example of the Polish Sarmatian tale (gaweda szlachecka). It is perhaps this variety, this amalgam of contradictions manifest in the novel, in its plot, and, too, in its author himself,  that led the novel's English translator to ask:

Do all those value systems have a single root, in the same way that the novel suggests (at certain points) that all religions spring indifferently from one source? Do they constitute the bundle of contradictions - integrity and duplicity, flesh and spirit, rigidity and suppleness, youth and maturity, indulgence and asceticism, prolixity and silence - which go to make up the human being? Could this be the hidden message of the book (...) this celebration of polyphony?
Ian Maclean, Introduction to The Saragossa Manuscript, Viking, 1995