Since its publication in 1970 Zettel's Traum/Bottom's Dream has been regarded as Arno Schimdt's magnum opus, as the definitive work of a titan of postwar German literature. Readers are now invited to explore its verbally provocative landscape in an English translation by John E. Woods.
¿I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was,¿ says Bottom. ¿I have had a dream, and I wrote a Big Book about it,¿ Arno Schmidt might have said. Schmidt¿s rare vision is a journey into many literary worlds. First and foremost it is about Edgar Allan Poe, or perhaps it is language itself that plays that lead role; and it is certainly about sex in its many Freudian disguises, but about love as well, whether fragile and unfulfilled or crude and wedded. As befits a dream upon a heath populated by elemental spirits, the shapes and figures are protean, its protagonists suddenly transformed into trees, horses, and demigods. In a single day, from one midsummer dawn to a fiery second, Dan and Franzisca, Wilma and Paul explore the labyrinths of literary creation and of their own dreams and desires.
Since its publication in 1970 Zettel¿s Traum/Bottom¿s Dream has been regarded as Arno Schimdt¿s magnum opus, as the definitive work of a titan of postwar German literature. Readers are now invited to explore its verbally provocative landscape in an English translation by John E. Woods.
"
Zettel's Traum is both Schmidt's most famous book and his least read." -Esther Yi,
The New Yorker
