The Continuation of Simplicissimus (Dedalus European Classics) - Softcover

Grimmelshausen, Johann Jakob Christoffel Von

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1910213926 ISBN 13: 9781910213926

Publisher: Dedalus Limited, 2019

Synopsis

The Continuation is Grimmelshausen's 'pilgrim's progress', the concluding chapter in one of the greatest and most acclaimed German novels. It combines fantastic episodes with a realistic narrative style.

At the end of his original adventures his hero withdraws from the world to live as a hermit in the Black Forest. Now, after a vivid dream of the Devil and all his minions at work, he decides to become a pilgrim and visit the holy places, making his way, with various encounters, across Switzerland to Italy, where he takes passage on a ship to Egypt. Outside Cairo he is captured by Arab robbers who take him to the Red Sea, exhibiting him as a wild man from the desert. Rescued by European merchants, he embarks on a ship to return home via the Cape of Good Hope, but the ship is wrecked and, 50 years before Robinson Crusoe, he is marooned on a desert island.

About this title

About the Author:

Johann Jakob Christoffel Von Grimmelshausen was born at Gelnhausen in 1621 or 1622. His early life was dominated by the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) in which he fought for both sides. He describes his first involvement in the war as a 'snotty-nosed ten-year-old musketeer' in his writing and served as a soldier until its end. His experiences in the Thirty years War are mirrored in his masterpiece, Simplicissimus which was first published in 1668 and was the first bestselling novel in Germany. Threel of his later work takes up themes and characters occurring in Simplicissimus,

Mike Mitchell has been a freelance literary translator since 1995. He has published eighty-nine translations from German and French, His translation of Rosendorfer's Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize after he had been shortlisted in previous years for his translations of Stephanie by Herbert Rosendorfer and The Golem by Gustav Meyrink. His translations have been shortlisted four times for The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, including for Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen.

Review:

"Grimmelshausen invented a naïve, feckless hero with a guileless, lovable persona whose innocent wisdom exposes the world around him. He symbolize sanity in a depraved, degenerate Europe torn apart by the Thirty Years' War." -- Jeremy Adler, The London Review of Books

"Simplicissimus is the eternal innocent, the simple-minded survivor, and we follow him to his final vocation as a hermit alone on an island. It is Rabelasian in some respects, but more down to earth and melancholy." --Phil Baker, The Sunday Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Dedalus Limited
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1910213926
• ISBN 13: 9781910213926
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 155