On 16 August 1968, I was put in his hands due to pen a book that Abbe Vallet, Le Manuscript de Dom Adson de Melk, Translated en français d'après the édition de Dom J. Mabillon (Aux Presses de l'Abbaye de la Source, Paris, 1842). The book, complete with historical information that was actually quite poor, claimed to reproduce faithfully a fourteenth-century manuscript, in turn, found in the monastery of Melk by the great seventeenth-century scholar, to whom we owe so much to the history of the order Benedictine. The scholarly Trouvaille (my third in time) entertained me while I was in Prague, waiting for a loved one. Six days later Soviet troops invaded that unhappy city. Luckily I was able to reach the Austrian border at Linz, and there I journeyed to Vienna where I reunited with the person, and together we sailed up the Danube.
In a climate of intellectual excitement I read with fascination the terrible story of Adso of Melk, and so I allowed myself to absorb almost a translation of jet spread it on some great books of Papeterie Joseph Gibert, which is so nice to write if the pen is soft. And so we reached the vicinity of Melk, where again, a peak on a bend of the river, stands the beautiful Stift restored several times over the centuries. As the reader will have guessed, in the monastery library I found no trace of the manuscript of Adso.
Before arriving in Salzburg, one tragic night in a small hotel on the shores of Mondsee, my association of travel was abruptly interrupted and the person traveling disappeared taking with him the book of Abbot Vallet, not malice, but because the abrupt and disorderly way in which it had ended our relationship. So I was left a series of handwritten notebooks in my hand, and a great emptiness in my heart.
Some months later in Paris, I decided to go deep into my research. Of the little information that I had taken from the French book, I remained il riferimento alla fonte, eccezionalmente minuto e preciso:
«Vetera analecta, sive collectio veterum aliquot opera et opusculorum omnis generis, carminum, epistolarum, diplomaton, epitaphiorum, et, cum itinere germanico, adaptationibus aliquot disquisitionibus R.P.D. Joannis Mabillon, Presbiteri ac Monachi Ord. Sancti Benedicti e Congregatione S. Mauri. - Nova Editio cui accessere Mabilonii vita et aliquot opuscula, scilicet Dissertatio de Pane Eucharistico, Azymo et Fermentatio, ad Eminentiss. Cardinalem Bona. Subjungitur opusculum Eldefonsi Hispaniensis Episcopi de eodem argumentum Et Eusebii Romani ad Theophilum Gallum epistola, De cultu sanctorum ignotorum, Parisiis, apud Levesque, ad Pontem S. Michaelis, MDCCXXI, cum privilegio Regis.» I found immediately
Vetera Analecta library Sainte Genevieve, but to my surprise the edition found inconsistencies with two things: first, the publisher, who was Montalant, for PP Ripam Augustinianorum (pontem prope S. Michaelis) and then the date, two years later. Needless to say, these analecta not any manuscript of Adso of Melk Adson or - and this is indeed, as anyone can check, a collection of texts of medium and short length, while the story transcribed by Vallet ran to several hundred pages . I consulted the Middle Ages famous as the dear and unforgettable Etienne Gilson, but it was clear that the only Vetera Analecta were those I had seen in Sainte Genevieve. A bet Abbaye de la Source, located near Passy, \u200b\u200band a conversation with my friend Dom Arne Lahnestedt also convinced me that no Abbe Vallet had published books with torches (also nonexistent). E 'notoriously careless French scholars bibliography of some trust, but the case beyond all reasonable pessimism. I began to think I had came across a fake. Now the same book Vallet was recovered (or at least did not dare go and ask those who had taken it from me). And I can only my notes, which was beginning to have doubts.
There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, which give visions of people known in the past ("I retraçant en ces details, J'en suis à me demander s'ils sont reels, you ou bien je les rêves to"). As I learned later from the delightful book of Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books not yet written.
If something had happened again I would still be wondering where the story of Adso of Melk, except that in 1970, in Buenos Aires, wandering on the banks of a little antiquarian bookseller on Corrientes, near the most famous Patio del Tango of the great road, I fell into the hands of the Castilian version of a booklet Temesvar Milo, the use of mirrors in the game of chess, which I had already had occasion to quote (second hand) in my Apocalyptic and integrated, reviewing his most recent vendors of Revelation. This was the original translation of the now unobtainable in Georgian (Tbilisi, 1934) and there, to my surprise, I read copious quotations from Adso's manuscript, except that the source was neither Vallet nor Mabillon, but Father Athanasius Kircher (but what work?). A scholar - I do not think that should be appointed - later assured me that (and quoted indexes in memory) the great Jesuit has never spoken of Adso of Melk. But the pages were Temesvar under my eyes and episodes in which she referred were very similar to those of the manuscript published by Vallet (in particular, the description of the maze leaves no room for doubt). Whatever he has also written Benjamin Placid1o, the Abbe Vallet had existed, and so certainly Adso of Melk.
I concluded that the memories of Adso seemed appropriately share the nature of the events he narrates: shrouded by many mysteries and inaccurate, beginning with the author and ending on the location of the abbey in Adso is silent with tenacious obstinacy, so that conjectures allow you to draw a vague area between Pomposa and Conques, with reasonable likelihood that the site arose along the ridge of the Apennines, between Piedmont, Liguria and France (as say, between Lerici and turbo). As for the period in which the events described take place, we at the end of November 1327, when you write the author is uncertain. Calculating that it says novice in '27 and is close to death as he writes his memoirs, we can surmise that the manuscript was written in the last decade or two of the fourteenth century.
A well thought, very few were the reasons that could lead us to give my prints the Italian version of an obscure neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth-century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German Monaco at the end of the fourteenth century.
First, what style to adopt? The temptation to make my Italian models in the period had to be rejected as totally unjustified: Adso writes not only in Latin, but it is clear from the whole course of the text that his culture (or culture of the abbey that clearly influences him) is much more dated, this is clearly a sum of centuries-old knowledge and stylistic quirks that are linked to the medieval Latin bass tradition. Adso thinks and writes like a monaco has remained impervious to revolution of the vernacular, linked to the pages housed in the library of which he narrates, educated on school-patristic texts, and its history (beyond references and events of the fourteenth century, which Adso with countless perplexities and always hearsay) could have been written since the language and learned quotations, in the twelfth or thirteenth century.
On the other hand there is no doubt that in translating his French Gothic Adso's Latin, Vallet has introduced a number of its licenses, and not only stylistic. For example, the characters speak sometimes of the herbs clearly referring to the book of secrets attributed to Albertus Magnus, who took over the centuries countless remakes. And 'certain that Adso knew him, but the fact remains that he cites the tracks echoing too literally want recipes of Paracelsus clear tweens want to secure an issue of Alberta era Tudor.2 On the other hand I found later that in the days when the transcribed Vallet (?) Adso's manuscript, circulated in eighteenth-century Paris edition of the Grand and Petit Albert 3 as irretrievably polluted. However, how to be sure that the text which Adso or the monks of the speeches which he noted, did not include, among glosses, scholia, and various appendices, annotations that were fed back to culture?
Finally, I had to keep Latin in the steps that the Abbot did not consider it appropriate to translate Vallet, perhaps to preserve air time? There was no clear justification for doing so, but a perhaps misplaced sense of loyalty to my source ... I deleted the spare, but I have retained. And I fear I have done as bad novelists, staging a French character, they say "parbleu" and "femme, ah! la femme. "
In conclusion, I am full of doubts. I just do not know why I have decided to take my courage in both hands as if it was authentic and to submit the manuscript of Adso of Melk. We say, an act of love. Or, if you will, a way to rid myself of numerous obsessions.
transcribe without worries of the day. During the years when I discovered the Abbé Vallet widespread conviction that one should write only commitment to the present, and to change the world. Ten or more years away is now the man of letters (restored to his loftiest dignity) can be written out of pure love of writing. And so I now feel free to tell, for sake fabulatorio, the story of Adso of Melk, and I feel comfort and consolation in finding that immeasurably remote in time (now that the waking of reason has dispelled all the monsters that his sleep had generated), so gloriously free of our day, timeless alien to our hopes and our certainties.
it is a tale of books, not of everyday worries, and reading it can lead to acting, with its great imitator a Kempis: "In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nisi in angulo cum nusquam inventory book."
January 5, 1980 
0 comments:
Post a Comment