Eduard Mörike

First English translation of Mörike's strikingly modern artist-novel of 1832. When one thinks of German artist-novels and Bildungsromane, works long available in translation come to mind--by Goethe, Novalis, Hoffmann, Stifter, Keller, or more recently by Mann, Kafka, Musil, or Grass. Yet Eduard Mörike's provocatively subtitled Maler Nolten: Novelle in zwei Teilen (Nolten the Painter: A Novella in Two Parts, 1832) has remained neglected and misunderstood, and until now has never been translated into English, despite itsobvious ties to other artist-novels and its striking modernity in playing with conventions of narrative authority and heroic identity. Witness the subtle irony of the opening sequence, in which the narrator is subverted by hintsat his own clumsiness and intimations about the dire truths that lurk behind the protagonist Nolten's relationships to his male friends and to the seductive yet somehow frightening women in his life. Or the interplay between the narrator's attempts to make sense of Nolten's complex inner motivations in his loves and art and the ludicrously pompous pathos with which Nolten persists in speaking and thinking, as he concocts a heroic persona caught up in passion, intrigue, and tragedy. Fascinating too is the mysterious trail of the "Grenzgänger," or border-line characters, with their hints at the dimension of "Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves" that seems to threaten and at the same time tofoster the complex unfolding of the realities of life and art that defy Nolten's all-too-artful "mastery." Raleigh Whitinger is Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of Alberta.

The novella 'Mozart's Journey to Prague' (1855) is an imaginary recreation of the journey Mozart made from Vienna in 1787 to conduct the first performance of Don Giovanni. Set in the rococo world of the Bohemian nobility, it is a charming and playful evocation of Mozart's inner life and creative processes. Morike is one of Germany's greatest lyric poets after Goethe. His poetry combines classicism, romanticism, with elements of the traditional folk or faery tale. This edition contains all the poems for which he is most admired - including the comic idyll, 'The Auld Weathercock'.

Eine Auswahl der schönsten Gedichte Eduard Mörikes (1804-1875) hat Hermann Hesse in diesem Band zusammengestellt und eingeleitet. Hesse beschäftigte sich fast während seines ganzen Lebens in Aufsätzen, Besprechungen und Briefen immer wieder mit Mörike, diesem bedeutendsten deutschen Lyriker zwischen Realismus und Romantik. Neben 50 von Hesse ausgewählten Mörike-Gedichten dokumentiert dieser Band mit zahlreichen Illustrationen zu Leben und Werk des Dichters sowie einer großen Anzahl von Mörike-Zeichnungen auch die wichtigsten Äußerungen Hesses über Mörike. Den Abschluß bildet der bedeutende Mörike-Essay des von Hesse hochgeschätzten Dichters Wolf von Niebelschütz.