Traducción al castellano, con algunas leves libertades, del texto original en francés (aquí), publicado en el blog de Henry Landroit. El propio Landroit es el autor del texto original.
http://landroit.blogspot.fr
BIOY CASARES, Adolfo (1914-1999). Typescript of La invención de Morel (c. 1939). Extensively corrected and amended in the author’s hand. Signed and inscribed, “Agrego ahora (1998) un saludo afectuoso a mis amigos Joanne y Donald. Adolfo Bioy C. Buenos Aires, 1998.”
152 pages, 8vo (watermark: Dalla Extra Strong 9000). Bound through punch holes on left margin in green manila folder (folder torn). Some chipping and closed tears along edges, none affecting text. Holograph typographical or grammatical corrections on virtually every page. Some 32 pages bear substantial additions or deletions of text. Provenance: Presented by the author to Jorge Luis Borges; presented by Borges to Donald A. Yates, who subsequently asked Bioy Casares to sign and inscribe it during a visit to Buenos Aires in 1998.
The only known manuscript of this important novel. The extensive holograph changes reveal significant changes from typescript to published text, including holograph alterations of the name of one of the book’s pivotal characters from “Justine” to “Faustine.” The title character Morel also bears a different name in the typescript, “Guerin.” In all, some 158 words are added in holograph. La invención de Morel was Bioy Casares’s fifth published novel, but the one that made his reputation. It is the story of a man who finds himself on a remote island, a fugitive from justice, but the circumstances of his presence there are left vague. His solitude is ruptured by the arrival of a group of tourists who do not seem to register his presence. One of whom, the beautiful Faustine, becomes the object of the narrator’s obsession (Bioy Casares has likened this fascination to his own enchantment with the American silent film star, Louise Brooks—a vocal casualty of the talkies). At length the narrator discovers Morel’s invention: a projector that broadcasts a life-like re-creation of experience, intended to allow a recurring film loop in which Morel can indulge his own unquenchable love for Faustine.
The cultural impact of this short work has been huge and lasting, ranging from the Resnais/Robbe-Grillet film Last Year at Marienbad (1967) to the American television series Lost. It contains echoes of classic works such as Robinson Crusoe and, even more notably, H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau. Borges, in his Prologue, says, “To classify it as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole.” Later practitioners of magical realism have credited the work as an important influence. But scholars, such as Daniel Balderston, see Bioy Casares inhabiting a distinct creative path from the magical realists. “His writing,” Balderston says, “is not marked by the excess that many North American readers associate with Latin American writing; his brand of the fantastic is never disconnected from reality, and he is always attentive to the cadences—and the commonplaces—of everyday speech.”
Bioy Casares gave the manuscript to Jorge Luis Borges, his friend and collaborator on several works of detective fiction, including Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi (1942). Borges, in turn, presented this typescript to Donald A. Yates, now professor emeritus of Spanish American Literature at the University of Michigan (East Lansing). Yates collaborated with Borges on translating the first of Borges’s works to appear in English: the 1962 New Directions edition of Labyrinths. He also translated Bioy Casares’s Diary of the War of the Pig (McGraw-Hill, 1972).