Chapter 3 Author's Preface

On August 6, 1968, I received a book by Abe Wallais, entitled The Manuscript of Friar Adsor of Melek, translated into French by Friar Dean Mabillon (1842 Published by Fountain Abbey in Paris).The book is accompanied by very little historical material, but claims to have faithfully reproduced a fourteenth-century manuscript written in May by a great scholar of St. Benedict's order in the eighteenth century. Discovered by Luck Abbey.This academic discovery (I mean mine is the third in chronological order) makes me very happy.I was in Prague waiting for a close friend.Six days later, the Soviet army invaded that sad city. I risked my life and managed to escape to the border of Linz in northern Austria. From there, I went to Vienna to meet my loved ones, and together we took a boat up the Danube.

With excitement, I read Adso's story obsessively, and at the same time, in the extreme intoxication, I almost finished the translation in one go, using up several large Gilbert's very fluent quill notebooks.While I was still translating, we arrived near Melek. On the hills of the river bend, the monastery, which has been restored many times over the centuries, still stands majestically.As the reader must have guessed, I found no record of Adso's manuscript in the monastery library. Before our arrival in Salzburg, we stopped one night in a small hotel on the banks of the Mondesi River, and my tourist friendship was cut short. Books, too... not out of anger, but because our relationship had come to an end so abruptly and so entangled.All that remained of me was a few manuscripts of notes I had written, and a great emptiness in my heart.

A few months later in Paris, I decided to get to the bottom of it.In addition to a few items of information deduced from the French translation, I have a bibliography of the provenance of the manuscript, which is exceptionally detailed and precise. In the library of San Genevius I soon found a copy of Anecdote of Vitra. But to my surprise, the version I found had two significant differences from the references: first, the name of the publisher was different; second, it was two years later.Needless to say, the manuscript of Adso of Melek is not included in this volume. Instead, as anyone interested can guess, it is nothing more than a collection of short stories and novellas, hundreds of pages of which Wallace transcribed.I consulted well-known medieval scholars, such as Edin Gieson, but apparently the Anecdote of Vitra, which I saw in the library of San Genevieve, was unique.I went again to Fountains Abbey near Passy, ​​and after speaking with Brother Arnie Lenett, I was able to ascertain that the Abbey had not published any works by an Abbe Walley (or even at all. books).French scholars have always paid little attention to bibliography, and the information is often inaccurate, but this case is too unreasonable.I'm beginning to suspect that what I'm seeing is a forged book.I can't get the book back (or rather, I can't get it back from the person who took it), and all that's left are the manuscripts, but I'm suspicious of them too.

There are some magical moments, when the body is extremely exhausted and the motor nerves are extremely excited, it will cause people to have illusions belonging to the past.I later learned from Abe Walley's little book that these visions also included unwritten books. If it hadn't been for new developments in the matter later, I still doubt who actually wrote the story of Melek's Adso; but in 1970, in Buenos Aires, Cory In a small second-hand bookstore not far from the famous "Tango Patio" on Ante Street, when I was browsing among the bookshelves, I stumbled across a work written by Milo Townshua in the Castile edition: "Playing Chess Through the Mirror".It was the George V (1934) original Italian edition, now out of print; in this book, I read, most by accident, a quote from Adso's manuscript, although the source was neither by Wallace nor Not from The Anecdote of Vitra, but from the work of a priest named Jedenser Koch (however the title of the book is unknown).A scholar—whose name will remain anonymous—assured me that, as far as he could remember, the great Jesuit never mentioned Adso of Melek.But Tong Sihua's book was before me, and the episodes he quoted were exactly the same as those in Wallace's manuscript (the description of the maze was especially accurate).

My conclusion is that the events that Adso narrates are his memoirs: shadowed by many mysteries, beginning with the authorship and ending with the site of the monastery—Adeso is stubborn and unconcerned about this. Be careful not to disclose.From conjecture we can delimit an indistinct region between Pompassa and Congers, and it is probable that the monastery was on the central ridge of the Apennines between Piedmont, Lijulian and France.As for the time when the events described in the book occurred, it should be in November 1327; on the other hand, the date when the author wrote the article is unknown.Since the author stated that he was a novice monk in 1327, and that he was near the end of his life when he wrote his memoirs, we can roughly infer that the manuscript was written during the last decade or two of the fourteenth century.

After much reflection, I decided that the Italian manuscript I had translated should be published. The original was written in Latin by a German monk at the end of the fourteenth century and was published in Latin in the seventeenth century, while I have based myself on a French translation of unknown origin. Most importantly, what style should I use?I must not use the Italian style of the time: not only because Adso wrote in Latin, but also, according to the whole text, his culture (or the monastic culture, which obviously had a profound influence on him) goes back much farther period; the Latin tradition of the end of the Middle Ages is the sum total of centuries of learning and refined stylistic aphorisms.Adso was a monk, his thoughts and writing style were not affected by the dialect revolution of the Renaissance at that time, and he still stuck to the books in the library he mentioned, reading the classics engraved by the early Christian church fathers; Judging from the language and the profound quotations, his story is not different from the works of the 12th and 13th centuries (except for the references and events of the 14th century, which Adso recorded with great confusion) .

On the other hand, Vallett's translation of Adso's original Latin into his own neo-Gothic French must have had free rein, and not just in terms of style.For example, characters in the book sometimes speak of the properties of herbs, clearly referring to Albert Manu's book of herbs, which has undergone countless revisions over the centuries.Adso was no doubt familiar with the book, but the few passages he quotes from it, whether of the Paracels prescription or the apparent falsification from the edition of Albert's herbal book Dude, are almost intact. Draw a gourd according to the same pattern.However, I later discovered that at the time Vallett was copying Adso's manuscript, there were eighteenth-century editions of the Grand Duke and Le Petit Iberd in circulation in Paris, both of which were riddled with errors.In any case, how can I be sure that the texts known to Adso, or the eminent monks whose speeches he recorded, do not contain any commentaries or appendices that would go on to influence later learning?

In the end, am I going to keep those Latin sentences that Abe Wallace, perhaps in order to be true to the circumstances of the time, did not think appropriate to translate?There's no particular reason to do so.But I always feel that it should be as true to the original as possible... In the end I removed the unnecessary, but still kept a lot.I am afraid I am imitating those bad novelists who, describing a French character, make him cry: "Of course!" and "Woman, ah! woman!" In short, I have no doubts in my mind.I don't know why I decided to take the courage to present Adso's manuscript.Let's say it was an act of love, or a way to undo many of my own stubborn ideas.

When I translated this book, I did not consider the issue of timeliness.At the time when I discovered Abe Walley's translation, everyone believed that writing should be meaningful, meaningful, and improve the world.Now, after more than a decade, the writer (restored to his proudest dignity) can finally write all he wants again. So now I feel that I can tell Adso's story just for the pleasure of narrative, and at the same time find that the background time of this story is extremely remote expulsion), which has nothing to do with our times, nor our ideas of hope or affirmation, which lightens me even more.

Because it's just a story, not a worrying trivial matter.