by Unknown
Walser, Robert, ‘The Kiss’ (‘Der Kuß I’), from Robert Walser, Kleine Dichtungen (Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1980), published with the permission of Suhrkamp Verlag.
Zürn, Unica, ‘The Experiment or the Victory of the Children’ (‘Das Experiment oder der Sieg der Kinder’), from Unica Zürn, Gesamtausgabe in 5 Bänden (Verlag Brinkmann & Bose, Berlin, 1989), published with the permission of Verlag Brinkmann & Bose.
The following translations previously appeared in print: ‘Descent into the Mines’, by Heinrich Heine, in Fiction, 1996, and in Travel Pictures, by Heinrich Heine, translated by Peter Wortsman (Archipelago Books, 2008); ‘St Cecilia or the Power of Music’, by Heinrich von Kleist, in Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist, translated by Peter Wortsman (Archipelago Books, 2010); ‘Peter Schlemiel’, by Adelbert von Chamisso, in Peter Schlemiel: The Man Who Sold his Shadow, translated by Peter Wortsman (Fromm Publishing International, 1993); ‘The Seamstress’, by Rainer Maria Rilke, in Fence, 2009; ‘My Gmunden’, in Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg, translated by Peter Wortsman (Archipelago Books, 2005); ‘The Blackbird’, by Robert Musil, in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, translated by Peter Wortsman, now in its third edition (Eridanos Library, 1987; Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics, 1995; Archipelago Books, 2006), excerpted yet again in Flypaper, by Robert Musil (Penguin Mini Modern Classics, 2011); ‘The Lunatic’, by Georg Heym, in Formations, 1987; ‘The Onion’, by Kurt Schwitters, in Fiction, 1992, and The Cambridge Literary Review, 2010; ‘The Magic Egg’, by Mynona, in The Spitting Image, 1996; ‘Conversation’, by Jürg Laederach, in Fiction, 1989, and in 69 Ways to Play the Blues, by Jürg Laederach, translated by Peter Wortsman (Semiotext[e] Foreign Agents Series, 1990).
I would like to express my gratitude to the Fulbright Association for enabling my initiation into the wit and wisdom of German Märchen on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1973 at the Albert Ludwig Universität in Freiburg im Breisgau. I would also especially like to thank the American Academy in Berlin, its trustee Stefan von Holtzbrinck and the Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, whose family name I bore as an honorific title, as a Holtzbrinck Fellow, and in particular, its director Gary Smith, for allowing me the time and leisure in 2010 and the peace of its charmed digs on the shore of the Großer Wannsee to complete this project. I would also like to mention my profound appreciation for the editorial acumen of Anna Hervé, the sharp and insightful editorial skills of Linden Lawson, and the support of all the members of the staff at Penguin Classics.
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PENGUIN CLASSICS
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This edition first published in Penguin Classics 2012
Translation, selection and editorial material © Peter Wortsman, 2012
Cover: Melancholy of the Mountains, 1929, Coloured woodcut by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (photograph: AKG Images)
All rights reserved
The moral right of the authors, editor and translator has been asserted
The Acknowledgements on pp. 359–361 constitute an extension of this page
ISBN: 978-0-14-119881-1
* Daniel Niklaus Chodowiecki (1726–1801), Polish-German painter and printmaker.
† Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, aka Giuseppe Balsamo (1743–95), Italian occultist, forger and adventurer.
* Excerpted from ‘The Harz Journey’ in Travel Pictures.
* aka Salomo Friedlaender.
† Reference to Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945), a German-Jewish poet famous for her bohemian lifestyle.
* aka Salomo Friedlaender.
* aka Alfred Henschke.
* aka Kurt Tucholsky.
* Literally ‘one-year volunteer’.
† Literally ‘topmost button of a pair of underpants’.
* The literal translation of the title does not do it justice. Hundeblume in the German, literally ‘dog flower’, is indeed a dandelion, but the English lacks the blossom’s bark.
* Here, again, the translator is at a loss. The German wild flower Löwenzahn, another name for Hundeblume, literally ‘lion’s tooth’, packs a barbarous bite that the English ‘dandelion’ can only meekly mimic.
* Reference to the play Der Zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Jug), by Heinrich von Kleist.
