Authorial Variants: Manuel Villegas López and the Manuscripts on the Life of John Sutter

Abstract

In 1941, the Spanish exile Manuel Villegas López published in Editorial Atlántida of Buenos Aires the book Vida de Sutter, a biographical novel about the Californian pioneer Johann Augustus Sutter (1803-1880). This subject had already been covered by, among others, Blaise Cendrars in his novel L’Or (1925) and Stefan Zweig in one of the episodes of Sternstunden der Menschheit (1927). It had even given rise in 1936 to two films: Sutter’s Gold and Der Kaiser von Kalifornien. This article studies the three authorial variants that Villegas wrote about this historical figure: the first consisting of 11 chapters, published in 1941; the second of 36 chapters, closed in 1960 with the collaboration of his wife, Remedios Zalamea Herrera, written for a literary prize, which remains unpublished; and the third consisting of 6 chapters, signed with a pseudonym, also unpublished and undated. All these materials were found in the Family Archive that holds part of the Villegas legacy. The purpose of the article is to use the theoretical and methodological framework of textual criticism applied to the modern manuscript to discover the variants: the most recent variant, the most wordy, the best preserved or codex optimus or the editio princeps.