Simplicissimus : the German Adventurer / by Hans Jacob Christoffel Von Grimmelshausen ; Translated by John C
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by Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen Simplicissimus,The German Adventurer Translated by JOHN C. OSBORNE With a Foreword by LYNNE TATLOCK Simplicissimus, The German Adventurer by Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen Translated by JOHN C. OSBORNE The GermanWith a Foreword Adventurer by Simplicissimus,LYNNE TATLOCK The German Simplicißimus That is: The Description of the Life of a Peculiar Wanderer Named Melchior Sternfels von Fuchshaim, Including Where and in What Manner He Came into This World, What He Saw, Learned, Experienced and Put Up With Therein; Also Why He Voluntarily Left It. Exceedingly Amusing and in Many Ways Useful to Read. Brought to Light by German Schleifheim of Sulsfort Monpelgart Printed in the Shop of Johann Fillion In the Year 1669. Newfound Press THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE LIBRARIES, KNOXVILLE Simplicissimus, The German Adventurer © 2008 by Martha Lee Osborne All rights reserved. Newfound Press is a digital imprint of the University of Tennessee Libraries. Its publications are available for non-commercial and educational uses, such as research, teaching and private study. The author encourages the “fair use” of these materials as defined in current U.S. Copyright Law. You may reproduce Newfound Press materials by printing, downloading, or making copies without prior permission as long as the original work is credited. For all other uses, contact: Newfound Press University of Tennessee Libraries 1015 Volunteer Boulevard Knoxville, TN 37996-1000 www.newfoundpress.utk.edu Cover illustration is frontispiece from the 1669 edition, courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. ISBN-13: 978-0-9797292-2-5 ISBN-10: 0-9797292-2-x Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoph von, 1625-1676. [Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus. English] Simplicissimus : the German adventurer / by Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen ; translated by John C. Osborne ; with a foreword by Lynne Tatlock. 899 p. ; 21 cm. Translation of: Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648 -- Fiction. 2. Simplicissimus (Fictitious character) -- Fiction. I. Osborne, John C., 1928- II. Title. PT1731.A7 E5 2008 Book design by Jayne Rogers and Martha Rudolph Contents Foreword. v Preface. xxvi Introduction. 1 Book I. 8 Book II. 187 Book III . 383 Book IV. 567 Book V . 736 Foreword: Reading “Simplicissimus” in Translation in 2008 Lynne Tatlock Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities Washington University in St. Louis ITH THE online edition of John C. Osborne’S hitherto unpublished translation, Simplicissimus, The German Adventurer, the Newfound Press at the WUniversity of Tennessee makes readily available to an English- speaking audience worldwide Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s masterpiece. A searing coming to terms with the Thirty Years’ War and the chaos that it drew in its wake, this early novel is arguably the most important German literary work of the seventeenth century. Translating Simplicissimus Ever humbling, the art of translation demands compromise, judgment, and creativity. Translating a literary text, especially one as complex as Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmels- hausen's Simplicissimus, presents multiple challenges that the unschooled reader cannot begin to suspect. How one translates is, furthermore, inevitably influenced by the venue of publication and the norms and expectations of the historical moment, be they those of a broad reading public or those within academic circles. The following sometimes critical overview of Simplicissimus in translation is written in deep appreciation of the difficulties faced by v each translator who took on the daunting task of rendering Grimmelshausen’s masterpiece into English for a specific time and a specific audience. John Osborne’s translation of the edition princeps of Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus (printed by Wolff Eberhard Felssecker in Nuremberg, dated 1669) here sees the light of day in electronic form almost one hundred years after Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus was belatedly translated into English for the first time and published in the United Kingdom. The first English translator, A.T.S. Goodrick, who identified himself on the title page of a later edition as “sometime fellow and tutor of St. John’s College, Oxford” (Routledge, 1924), justified his translation of 1912 as more important as “a contribution to the history…or the sociology of the momentous period to which the romance of ‘Simplicissimus’ belongs, than as a specimen of literature” (1912, 1). Goodrick characterizes the book’s chief interest for the then-modern reader as lying “in the pictures or rather photographs of contemporary manners and characters which it presents” (1912, 1), thus implying that Grimmelshausen’s novel could be taken at face value as a lively documentation of the Thirty Years’ War and its aftermath. Working principally with Tittmann’s edition of Simplicissimus, published in 1877, as the basis for his translation, Goodrick did not have at his disposal the wealth of scholarship (beginning with Jan Hendrik Scholte’s vi important scholarly edition of the novel [Saale: Niemeyer, 1938]) that has brought contemporary scholars to a deeper understanding of this complex seventeenth-century text. Furthermore, ideas about the novel as it had developed in England shaped his expectations of Grimmelshausen’s text—both in what he praised and in what he disdained or disregarded. Goodrick may not have fully understood the nature of the book he translated, a hybrid text composed of disparate kinds of writing, some of it original and some not, a work that operates in multiple modes of representation including allegory and emblem. He did not know, for example, the full extent of Grimmelshausen’s reliance on, indeed pirating of, other texts, of his tendency to cut and paste. Nor did he understand the importance of this ubiquitous practice for the seventeenth-century writer. The vivid description of the Battle of Wittstock in chapter 27 of book 2, for example, that can tempt modern readers to speak of realism, borrows liberally from an encyclopedic work of the seventeenth century, the Theatrum Europaeum. Goodrick did know, however, that the concluding chapter of book 5 of the novel quotes at length Aegidius Albertinus’s translation from 1599 of Atonius de Guevara’s Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea (1539; Scorn of the Court and Praise of the Village). Yet this borrowing appears to have offended his sense of the originality and integrity of the book. He simply omitted this vii key reflection on vanity, a central theme of Simplicissimus, with the words: “The first part of the chapter is a fair translation, extended to many pages, of Quevara’s [sic] somewhat trite reflections on the vanity of a worldly life. … The only part of the chapter which concerns the story is as follows” (1912, 403). Elsewhere he elected not to translate a chapter because he found it “uninteresting”: “Chap. xix. is an uninteresting excursus on certain communities of Anabaptists in Hungary” (1912, 389), he writes, missing the point that the interest in the utopian community of the Anabaptists is entirely consonant with one of the central concerns of a novel that opens with a lament about social climbing as symptomatic of the chaotic times. Goodrick elected to translate Grimmelshausen into an archaic English that in 1912 powerfully evoked the seventeenth century. The English of this translation, however, sounds very quaint in 2008, though it is not as archaic subsequently as the opening sentence leads the reader to expect, “There appeareth in these days of ours…a certain disease which causeth those who do suffer from it… forthwith to give themselves out as gentlemen and nobles of ancient descent” (Goodrick 1912, 1) . Appearing in several different editions under two different titles, Goodrick’s translation remained the lone, and thus definitive, English translation for fifty years. However, by the time it was republished yet again in 1962, this time with the viii University of Nebraska Press, it had a rival: Walter Wallich’s The Adventures of a Simpleton which appeared with The New English Library Limited in that same year. Like Goodrick, Wallich abridges the text according to his own lights. Noting the need to pare the book down to a size manageable in one volume, Wallich writes in his postcript: “The cuts have been made in such a way as to preserve the continuity of the story, omitting mainly a highly fantastical journey to the centre of the earth, a certain amount of moralizing, and a peroration near the end which Grimmelshausen lifted bodily—with due acknowledgements—from the Spanish divine Guevara” (Wallich, 249). Precisely this moralizing is, however, central to the vision of the text and the mentality of the age that produced it. Moreover, what Wallich calls the “journey to the centre of the earth,” the famous Mummel Lake adventure from book V, belongs to one of several allegorical episodes that provide sharp commentary on the social formations and mores of the day. Wallich’s translation heralded a small boom in new translations of Simplicissimus. Two years later in 1964, a second new translation, Simplicius Simplicissimus by Hellmuth Weissenborn and Lesley MacDonald with engravings by Hellmuth Weissenborn, appeared in London with Calder. According to Weissenborn, the translation aims “to render the work in a style acceptable for this century, without ix expurgation, but retaining the vigour, truthfulness and occasional coarseness of the language” (9). Nevertheless, the translators chose to shorten “a few repetitive passages,” in essence yielding to the temptation to improve on Grimmelshausen to make him more palatable to modern tastes (Weissenborn, 9). Conflating the novel with its creator, Weissenborn characterizes the work in his introduction as “full of natural strength, born from an unspoiled and open heart” (Weissenborn, 10). A third abridged translation by George Schulz-Behrend followed a year later in 1965. Behrend’s lively and highly readable, but significantly abridged, translation was re-published with Camden House in 1993.