THE MEMOIRS OF CASANOVA
SIR,--In his review of the final volumes of the re- issue of Arthur Machen's translation of Casanova's memoirs, Mr. Simon Raven writes:
. • while the texts of the Memoirs pose nightmarish problems of scholarship and detec- tion (they have been translated, retranslated, censored, pirated, forged, pilfered and burnt), there is good reason to suppose that Machen made his version from a text which, by prevail- ing standards, is authentic in origin and little mutilated by time or prudery. When Arthur Machen was making his translation forty years or more ago, these statements might have been believed, though they are mostly quite in- accurate. The manuscript, which was originally written in French, has been preserved by its original publishing house. F. A. Brockhaus. of Wiesbaden, and is complete with the exception of two small sections—six chapters out of about 120. Last year Brockhaus of Wiesbaden in conjunction with Plon of Paris started the first publication of the complete text, and have to date published six of the twelve volumes. Although there is no very great difference in the episodes, the character of Casanova appears in quite a different light when his text is presented as he wrote it; the first editor, Jean Laforgue, took enormous liberties with the text, not only 'correcting' the French and toning down the indelicacies, but turning the Catholic (or at any rate deist) writer into a free-thinker to suit his own predilections. Arthur Machen perforce used this distorted version.
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