One of my most favourite books ever is the Memoirs of Giacomo Casanova.
A few years ago I read the version on Gutenberg.org which unfortunately has no annotations whatsoever. The lack of annotations is a real drawback, especially as they should explain facts which were known at his time and the contemporary reader has no idea about or provide more background information on some people or translate his various Latin and other quotations.
Therefore, I planned to either buy an annotated version or search for the missing information myself. (And in the end I did both.)
But while researching all the missing bits myself, why not share it and collaborate with others who would help researching? Sounds already like a wiki, eh?
And then I read about and was fascinated by the history of the different editions and translations of the memoirs. The early editions are old enough to be in the Public Domain, so it’s easy to use them in the wiki as a basis for the annotations. So, why not present the most popular editions (French, English, German) side by side?
Well, that’s exactly what I did … I’m proud to present:
Paralis.org – The Annotated Casanova Synopsis Wiki
It’s a long way from being finished, but it’s a good start. Now I only need to keep it alive and search for collaborators.
I found a collection of short stories by Rafael Sabatini called Casanova’s Alibi. The title story was interesting and I thought I’d read the original source Casanova’s Memoirs. It was at this turn I learned that there are more than 3,500 pages in his monumental autobiography. Are you familiar with this bowdlerised version by Sabatini? It involved being pardoned and freed from prison using the ruse of being under a doctor’s care and discrediting the testimony of the person who had landed him there by escaping unseen and returning unseen…Any idea where this little episode is in the Memoirs? Thanks
I’ve never heard of this particular version. But I knew that there were lots of either abridged or “extended” or even completely invented versions of his memoirs. E.g. whole parts of the second French version (Paulin-Busoni, 1833-1837, crazily translated into French from German which was translated from French) were completely invented because it was so popular and people wouldn’t want to wait for the long translation process.
At first I couldn’t remember the episode you described. But I searched a bit and found that it is in chapter 7 of the first book: http://paralis.org/edition:machen:007#ID17
Just remember that the version on paralis.org is *not* the one based on the original manuscript. But this is the version that Sabatini would have had access to as the original manuscript was only published in 1960-62 and Sabatini published his book in 1914.