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Yury Tynyanov’s novel on the formative years of Russia’s greatest poet was first published in serial form between 1935 and 1943. Tynyanov pioneered a new kind of historical-biographical novel in Russia. ‘I begin,’ he wrote, ‘where documents leave off.’ In a blend of encyclopedic knowledge and creative imagination, he thrillingly brings early 19th-century Russia to life – Napoleonic invasion, rapid political change, and a vast gallery of characters, all representations of real life persons. Those who had a significant impact on Pushkin’s life include his unusual family, with its African blood (more…)

The narratives of Theodor Storm are among the outstanding achievements of classic German fiction. This third selection in Denis Jackson’s pioneering series of translations, which began with The Dykemaster (Der Schimmelreiter), contains three contrasting works of Storm’s middle period, the 1870s, when, in the words of Paul Heyse, he moved from ‘watercolours’ to ‘oils’. Paul the Puppeteer is a magical tale which speaks to all ages. Storm’s affectionate portrayal of the vanishing world of the marionette theatre also contains sharp social comment. The jeer in the Low German title of the story, Pole Poppenspäler, is that of solid, guild-dominated society at the travelling puppeteers and their gypsy-like way of life. The Village on the Moor arises directly out of Storm’s professional career: it is an account, told through an investigating lawyer’s eyes, of the case of a mysterious death out on the moor, the chief suspect being a girl of sinister aura with whom the young deceased was in love. Both these works are translated into English for the first time. Renate records the memories of an eighteenth-century Lutheran pastor and his love for a farmer’s daughter who is persecuted by the local community for alleged witchcraft; the clash between religious bigotry and spontaneous emotion drives one of the most moving stories in all Storm’s fiction.

The translator’s lively introduction and end notes, and six pages of maps, will add to the reader’s enjoyment of these stories.

‘Finely balanced between potential tragedy and empathy for those caught up in the structures that cause it, Paul the Puppeteer is a tale of great charm and humanity, yet not afraid of taking sides. It is framed here by two novellas linked by intimations of sorcery …’ – Maren Meinhardt, Times Literary Supplement

‘Why does one bite one’s lip with anxiety when Paul breaks the puppetmaster’s best puppet, or when the local yobbos start to wreck the show? And why, when our now grown-up heroine, half-starving, sees Paul’s face and cries out his name in the icy town square of Heiligenstadt, does one find one’s heart swelling for a moment with relief and joy? – It’s Storm’s painterly eye, of course, that does the trick. He takes us to the places where it happens and we see them plain; we are there. One can almost smell the drains.’ – Nicholas Bagnall, Slightly Foxed

The restless, alienated spirit of turn-of-the-century Vienna is brilliantly caught in these tales – hitherto not readily available together in English translation – by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, one of the major writers of the Early Modernist period and Richard Strauss’s librettist.

Powerful issues and emotions lie below the surface of these narratives – of a young aesthete’s crack-up as he wanders through a terrifying psychic landscape (The Tale of the 672nd Night); of an insubordinate soldier’s brutal nemesis during Field Marshal Radetzky’s (more…)

Marina Tsevetaeva (1891–1941) is acknowledged as one of the greatest of Russian poets. Like much of the most original Russian literature written since 1917, however, her narrative poem The Ratcatcher remained unpublished in Russia for some decades.

Tsevetaeva wrote this extraordinary work, which she subtitled ‘a lyrical satire’, in Prague and Paris in the mid-1920s. Using the story known to us as ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, she pits Art against Philistinism in a critique of all social search for material prosperity (including that of the Bolsheviks). Even for the innovative Tsvetaeva, this is quite a new kind of writing – an explosion of clashing sounds, voices and rhythms, fuelled by anger and bitter sarcasm. At the end the Piper, who stands for the magical power of Art, takes a terrible toll on the children of the town of Hamelin – neat, comfort-loving, hypocritical and reluctant to pay its debts.

The critic D. S. Mirsky saw The Ratcatcher as ‘the first really successful attempt to emancipate the language of Russian poetry from the tyranny of Greek, Latin and French …’, and found in it ‘wit in the most imaginative 17th-century meaning of the word’. This peak of Tsvetaeva’s verse has hitherto been virtually unknown in English. Angela Livingstone, long associated with 20th-century Russian poetry and with Tsvetaeva in particular, brilliantly recreates its wild music.

‘If I had not read The Ratcatcher, I should have been more at ease with my path of compromise … No praise is high enough for the miracle that it is.’ – Boris Pasternak

‘For the first time we have a readable Tsvetaeva which persuades us that she must have been a very great poet.’ – Lachlan MacKinnon, Times Literary Supplement

‘I think this is the very pinnacle of the art of translation; what translation of poetry should be but rarely is … Angela Livingstone’s version is so close in meaning to the original that I don’t see the liberties playing a major role here. Rhythm, rhyme and the meaning – everything is so much like the original, it’s almost … well, if not supernatural, then superb.’ – Nina Kossman

‘Reading Russian poetry in translation, I often have mixed feelings. The joy of discovery is quickly blotted out by vexation, and after a few dozen lines persistent annoyance sets in … Rarely, it is otherwise. In a finely tuned line of verse in the target language the style of the original begins to tremble with life, the incomparable music of Russian syllabo-tonic poetry, and then the original not only shines through the dense layers of a foreign linguistic element but seems to stand on a level with it, as if two brothers were comparing heights together. The first impulse is then to look at the translator’s name, and next, to go to the original to compare texts and admire the talent – of the poet or the translator? … Of both. This was my experience when this English translation of Tsvetaeva’s Ratcatcher fell into my hands … Hats off to Angela Livingstone!’ – Sergey Nikolaev, Rostov State University

Witty, lucid and profound, Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘brief poems’ have not enjoyed the prominence they deserve. Originally published in the three separate volumes Particles (1899), Jottings (1927) and Sparks (posthumous, 1945), they are, however, central to his poetry and personality, and span his entire career. Whether in miniature fables, epigrams, ironic quatrains, or fleeting verses jotted down during his travels, the voice of the great Bengali poet is always spontaneous, friendly and accessible in these poems, and will win him new admirers.Translations can usually only select from Tagore’s vast oeuvre. But in the case of the brief poems it is possible to translate virtually his entire output in the genre, and this is what William Radice, the leading English-language translator of Tagore and himself a poet, here does for the first time. His versions splendidly rise to the challenge of Tagore’s infinite variety of mood and form. There is a full introduction, and the book concludes with some prose writings relating to poetry and the writing of the brief poems, also translated into English for the first time.‘I have found the same simple delight and wonder in these ‘brief’ poems as in Gitanjali or in Tagore’s dramatic masterpiece The Post Office, also translated by William Radice.’ – Kathleen Raine, Temenos Academy Review‘People who do not know Bengali have much to thank William Radice for.’ – Khushwant Singh, The Telegraph, Calcutta‘This collection of the Brief Poems of Tagore offers an accessible introduction to the Bengali writer’s work. Concise, aphoristic and profound, Particles, Jottings, Sparks is enriched by William Radice’s insightful approach … intricate and refreshing.’ – David Moses, Edinburgh Review‘Many of these poems are wholesome light verse, but they display a playfulness and spontaneity that is like a breath of fresh air.’ – Debjanee Chatterjee, Wasafiri

Pushkin’s last verse drama, Rusalka, first written two years after the Little Tragedies (Mozart and Salieri and the three other miniature dramas), in his most mature blank verse, has hitherto been taken as a near-complete fragment. The main lines of the plot are familiar from the operas and operettas popular in Russia and elsewhere in Europe from those that swept St Petersburg in the first decade of the nineteenth century to Dvořak’s Rusalka of 1901. In Pushkin’s storyline a wandering prince gets a village girl pregnant and abandons her, and she throws herself into the river. Years later the prince passes by again and a water-sprite appears to him – the daughter of his former beloved, now queen of the water-sprites, who has sent her daughter to meet the prince in order to take her revenge by enticing him to the bottom of the river. In this version, which breaks off as the approaching dénouement becomes apparent, Pushkin recreates the world of Russian folk romance, with extraordinary realistic vividness, and just as vividly haunting in its eerie effects. But examining Pushkin’s manuscript in the mid-1970s, the actor-director Vladimir Retsepter suddenly became aware that Pushkin had revised and completed the work, though not making a fair copy. His revision was breathtakingly simple and profound: by switching the position of one scene and cutting seven lines he transformed his miniature drama from a blood revenge tragedy to a bloodless moral tragedy, leaping ahead at a stroke to the Ibsen-Chekhov era. In the revised version the prince does not meet the water-sprite sent to drown him, but after being made aware of his beloved’s death which he has caused, is found by a search-party sent out by his wife and returns to his loveless home and marriage.

In the first of two essays accompanying the dual text – D. M. Thomas’s English translation first published in 1982 being revised by the translator both stylistically and to accord with Pushkin’s revised text – Vladimir Retsepter tells an absorbing literary story which begins with Pushkin’s first editor, his friend and literary executor Vasily Zhukovsky, in a hurry to publish in order to help Pushkin’s family after his death, failing to understand Pushkin’s manuscript revisions, and ends with his own battle with the Soviet and the post-Soviet academic literary establishments to take Pushkin’s revisions seriously in the absence of a fair copy. In a second essay he traces the two stages in the composition of Rusalka and considers the revolutionary nature of Pushkin’s revisions. This new text is now generally accepted as the latest state of Pushkin’s manuscript and therefore of no lesser status than the hitherto canonical text.

The facsimile reproduction of Pushkin’s manuscript included in this edition clearly shows his revisions marked in pencil and in ink. Each facsimile page is accompanied by a full-page interpretive drawing by the well-known Russian artist Mihail Chemiakin, who lives and works in the United States, and his further drawings, sketches and motifs decorate the book throughout.

Vladimir Retsepter is Artistic Director of the Pushkin State Theatre Centre, St Petersburg, founded in 1992 with the aims of encouraging the performance of Pushkin’s drama both in Russia and abroad, organising Pushkin festivals, and developing a series of monographs and editions, the Pushkin Premiere series, in which The Return of Pushkin’s ‘Rusalka’ was published in 1998.

‘A sensational, performable extension of Pushkin’s dramatic oeuvre – Pushkin’s answer to Shakespeare.’ – British East-West Journal

‘A welcome addition to the small library of translations which give the reader an insight into the world of Russia’s greatest poet.’ – Diana Myers, Times Higher Education Supplement

Alexander Pushkin’s reputation as Russia’s greatest poet rests on more than Eugene Onegin. This selection of five of his finest narrative poems displays his essential qualities – his stylistic fluency, ironic poise, parodic playfulness and endless ability to surprise, his creation of poetry out of everyday language.The Gypsies, the anti-Romantic tale of a city-dweller whose search for ‘unspoiled’ values among gypsies ends in tragedy, is modern Russian literature’s first masterpiece – and a source for Bizet’s Carmen. The ballad The Bridegroom turns this Romantic genre into a whodunit filled with sexual dread and subconscious terror. Count Nulin, a deliciously comic tale of country life, stands (more…)

This book contains three verse narratives by Russia’s supreme poet. Each is a masterpiece of its own genre – and plays with that genre in an entirely Pushkinian way. The least known of them, The Bridegroom, in the stanza form of a wildly popular German Romantic ballad that swept Europe, is far more modern than a Romantic ballad. Count Nulin is a comic tale of Russian country life, as light as a soufflé, has the spontaneous brilliance of Eugene Onegin. The eerie, ironic Tale of the Golden Cockerel transforms the fairytale genre with its bitter subtext of Pushkin’s relations with the tsar.Antony Wood continues the endeavour he began in his much-admired versions of Mozart and Salieri and Pushkin’s other Little Tragedies – to render Pushkin’s style in compelling English verse. His introduction and end-notes place the poems in context, discuss the problems of translation, and give a glimpse of Pushkin’s life and world.Each poem opening has a drawing by a modern Russian artist.‘The Pushkin translations in The Bridegroom convey the flavour of this largely untranslatable writer … One has the rare feeling of reading the thing itself.’ – John Fuller‘The translator deserves a vodka toast for his witty and nimble translations of these three Pushkin verse tales.’ – Boyd Tonkin, Independent‘Lively, elegant and swift – all that I imagine Pushkin to be.’  Christopher Logue‘Antony Wood has produced a superb, crystalline rendering of “The Tale of the Golden Cockerel”, which is attentive to lexical and rhythmical repetition and sharp in its sparse imagery.’ – Oliver Ready, Times Literary Supplement‘… an outstanding translation of “Count Nulin”. one of Pushkin’s greatest comic poems, a parody of Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece set in the depths of the Russian countryside … There is nothing in English poetry quite like this translation; even Byron’s Don Juan seems, in comparison, heavy-footed.’ – Robert Chandler, Rossica

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), Portugal’s greatest poet since Camões, is a central figure of European Modernism and its perception of a collapse of the post-Romantic ‘I’ and of Western culture. Deeply introspective, seeking objectivity through ‘depersonalisation’, he wrote in various distinct personae. This selection is the first in English to concentrate entirely on poems written in Pessoa’s own name.

Jaime H. da Silva writes in his Introduction: ‘The translators have poetically presented a faithful version of the most confounding of Pessoa’s personae. Moreover, they have organised a collection which is representative of Pessoa’s themes and styles, and shows an evolution in his poetry and a summing-up. Insight into Self and into Self’s self-deceptions becomes the constant of those poems which deal with the problem of Being and Non-being… It is naïve, even primitive, awe, not understanding, that Pessoa magically conjures…’

The main body of these translations was awarded the British Comparative Literature Association’s Translation Prize for 1985. With others now added, they are published in parallel with the original texts.

‘The translators are faced with a daunting task indeed – to render this most brilliant and complex of poets into inventive, readable English. This they have done admirably.’ – Daniel Pires and Margaret Tejerizo, New Comparison

‘A welcome compilation … The Surprise of Being is undoubtedly indispensable.’ – John Pilling, PN Review

Miodrag Pavlović, the senior figure in Serbian poetry today, is less well known to the English-speaking world than his compatriots Vasko Popa and Ivan V. Lalić, although he has been widely translated into other European languages. This volume, containing fifty-seven poems, is the first substantial selection of his work in English. Pavlović’s poetry is rooted in Serbian historical mythology, which treats the tragic fate of the young Christian Serbian kingdom at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 as a grand sacrifice that saved medieval Christendom from the Ottoman yoke. The poems in this selection were written before events of the late 1990s demonstrated to the outside world how very much alive medieval events and the Kosovo issue still are in the Balkans.

Pavlović’s first collection 87 Poems, published in the last year of Stalin’s life, caused a political and literary furore, playing a major part in the launching of the modernist movement in Yugoslavia with an effect that might be compared in English terms to the first impact of the poets of the Great War and The Waste Land combined. In his next collections, he went on to link Serbian historical mythology with his own time, and the present volume selects from this major body of work as well as 87 Poems.

Pavlović’s interpretation of history and myth is in line with the major impetuses of international modernism, and he finds inspiration in T. S. Eliot, Yeats and Valéry in giving a sharply contemporary treatment and a broad European context not only to the mythologised heroic moment of Balkan history but also to the tradition of Ancient Greece, still keenly felt in the Balkans, and to themes from the New Testament and early Christianity.

The translations in this volume were prepared in close association with the poet.

‘In Miodrag Pavlović’s poems the remote past exists as immediately and as intensely as modern Belgrade. Yet his voice and technique are wholly modern and original. And that seems both natural and inevitable. It takes a black, dislocating sensibility like his to cope with a surreal inheritance in which violence and discontinuity are the only certainties.’ – A. Alvarez in his Foreword

‘In The Slavs beneath Parnassus, translated with an admirably helpful and lucid introduction by Bernard Johnson, the poet gives a synoptic view of his own people’s history, at once conquered and conquering, Christian and pagan … always close to folk tale and song, simple, moving and brilliant, a reminder of what our own culture no longer possesses.’ – Martin Dodsworth, Guardian

‘The appearance in English translation of so important a contemporary Serbian poet as Miodrag Pavlović is particularly welcome … Bernard Johnson has lent his versions an iambic flavour which adequately reflects the trochaic ambience of the original more or less free verse, preserving its individual qualities and atmosphere. One can hardly ask more from any translation … Pavlović’s poetry will surely convince English readers that Serbian poetry has much to say to the world.’ – E. D. Goy, Scottish Slavonic Review

Perhaps the greatest of the whole brilliant galaxy of Russian twentieth-century poets, Osip Mandelshtam died in a Siberian transit camp in 1938 at the age of forty-seven. The survival of many of his poems in desperate hiding-places and in the memories of those closest to him has been described by his widow Nadezhda in her memoirs Hope Against Hope. Dense and sonorous, his poetry magnificently merges the European past at its best with Russian experience at its worst.

James Greene’s substantial selection contains over a hundred poems from all periods of Mandelshtam’s career, from the three collections published during his lifetime, Stone (1913), Tristia (1922) and Poems (1928) as well as many others published only long after his death. The volume moves from a serene historic vision of European civilisation to the horrors of Stalinist repression.

James Greene’s versions of Mandelshtam have been widely praised above all others. The core of his selection was first published in 1977, and three times revised and expanded up to the present edition, which contains a new introduction by Donald Rayfield in addition to the two forewords to the first edition by Nadezhda Mandelshtam and Donald Davie.

‘The translations of Mr Greene are the best I ever saw.’ – Nadezhda Mandelshtam in her Foreword

‘James Greene has done a fine job … His versions have a fullness and roundness which is rare.’ – John Bayley, Observer

‘These are certainly the truest versions of Mandelshtam that have appeared. They are touching, strange and powerful.’ – Peter Levi, Sunday Times

‘Mandelshtam might well have recognised something akin to himself in these versions, in particular the sharp unexpected felicities of language, notably in some of the late and jagged fragments written in Voronezh.’ – Peter France, Times Literary Supplement

T. J. Reed’s translation – first published in 1986 – of Heine’s satiric masterpiece is the only English version to shape up to its outrageous rhymes and rhythms with anything like matching vigour and conviction. It is reissued with facing German text and updated further reading, with the introduction and notes of the first edition succinctly and entertainingly summarising the issue of Heine’s time and his comic achievement, and with added comment on his place in a new united Germany.

Written four years before the 1848 Revolution, Heine’s Deutschland can be enjoyed today just as it was by its first readers – as a brilliantly funny read. In this ‘verse travelogue’ Heine comments on the homeland he sees again after years of exile. Bull’s-eyeing a number of targets – bourgeois lethargy, rampant Prussianism, phoney medievalism, German idealist philosophy – Europe’s wittiest poet delightfully introduces the reader to ‘Germany’s current ferment’ – and to the idea that the value system of the German middle class helped to maintain social injustice and political oppression.

‘That rare phenomenon, ironic political verse, light in manner but not in matter.’ – D. J. Enright, Observer

‘Deutschland is brilliantly entertaining and retains its relevance for the modern reader through its classic consideration of the fraught relationship between revolutionary ideals and their practical consequences … T. J. Reed reproduces the comic associations created by rhyme and succeeds beautifully in recreating the pointed, epigrammatic effect of the terse rhythm. This bilingual edition is a fitting tribute to Heine – in Reed’s memorable phrase – that “passionate defender and outrageous taker of liberties”.’ – Anita Bunyan, Jewish Chronicle

‘Reed’s version is brilliantly successful, at times achieving what one might have thought impossible: English verse as witty and precise as the original.’ – Forum for Modern Language Studies

Corneille’s Horace (1640), together with its author’s Le Cid, launched French classical tragedy. It is a darkly gripping play which speaks directly to our own time. Corneille takes his plot from pre-Republican Roman history – the legendary episode of the triple combat between two sets of brothers to decide a war between Rome and Alba. Horatius’s sister, Camilla, is betrothed to his opponent Curiatius, and his wife Sabina is Curiatius’s sister. The scene is set for a clash between heroic male commitment to state interests and female values which give prime place to individual feeling.

Horace, containing pointed allusion to contemporary French military ambitions, has the power to challenge and disturb modern audiences with its unflinching reckoning of the personal cost of national glory.

This translation was commissioned by Damned Poets Theatre Company for a production at the Lyric Theatre Studio, Hammersmith in October 1996. The distinguished poet Alan Brownjohn compellingly recreates the rhetoric and passion of a neglected but magnificent work.

‘Corneille’s rhyming alexandrines have been superbly translated by Alan Brownjohn into a flexible blank verse which captures the nuances of meaning, but sounds as natural and flows as smoothly as prose. The language is discreetly updated, dignified but not pompous.’ – Maya Slater, Times Literary Supplement

‘Alan Brownjohn’s blank verse pentameters are clear and fresh without losing the patterning of Corneille’s emotional algebra.’ – Paul Taylor, Independent

‘Damned Poets’ highly effective production at the Lyric Studio, Hammersmith under Sydney Blake’s strong direction does full justice to the grandeur of the theme, as Alan Brownjohn’s specially commissioned translation brilliantly conveys the nobility and passion of the original in contemporary English …’ – Brian G. Cooper, The Stage

Gennady Aygi, a potent underground presence for three decades, is now accorded leading status in Russia and many Eastern and Western European countries. Born in the Chuvash Autonomous Republic, he was encouraged by Pasternak to write in Russian in the late 1950s, since when he has lived and worked, often precariously, in Moscow. ‘Like Hopkins with English,’ Edwin Morgan has written, ‘Aygi forces the Russian language to do things it has never done before.’ The language of his free verse is disjunctive, subconscious, anti-rational. His poetry is at the confluence of avant-garde European modernism and the traditional culture of his near-Asiatic homeland. His themes – stillness, communion between human and non-human worlds, memory, birth, sleep – provide room for deeply felt responses to both private and public events.

This first substantial presentation of Aygi’s poetry to the English-speaking world, with original texts and facing translations, and the translator’s critical introduction, end notes and close readings of three poems, draws on each of the mature poem-sequences.

‘The most original voice in contemporary Russian poetry, and one of the most unusual voices in the world.’ – Jacques Roubaud, Times Literary Supplement

‘It is a pleasure to find a book where difficult Russian poems not only have been translated without any errors, but also work as English poems … This is a thought-provoking volume, and Peter France and the publishers have done all lovers of poetry a major service.’ – Andrew Reynolds, Journal of European Studies

‘Aygi’s neologisms pose a challenge for any translator … France translates as literally as possible … This policy of judicious accuracy, honed, no doubt, by his many conversations with the poet, allows France to convey Aygi’s often startlingly beautiful verbal effects … This reasonably priced, impeccably produced book is a model of its type.’ – Michael Pursglove, Translation and Literature

In his prime, Mikhail Zoshchenko was more widely read in his own country than Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn. His short stories give expression to the bewildered experience of the ordinary Soviet citizen struggling to survive in the 1920s and ’30s, beset by an acute housing shortage and scarcity of consumer goods, ubiquitous theft and corruption, and an impenetrable new ideological language. Written in the semi-educated language of the man and woman in the street, they enshrine one of the greatest achievements of the people of the Soviet Union – their gallows humour.Housing-block tenants who reject electricity because it illuminates their squalor too harshly, a young couple who live in a bathroom, a theft-hit community in every one of whose members a sniffer-dog sniffs out traces of anti-social misdemeanours, a railway-line manager making a speech against bribery who lets slip his secret love of the backhander – Zoshchenko doesn’t simply make fun of his characters, as previous translators have assumed. This ‘temporary substitute for the proletarian writer’, as he called himself, has much sympathy for his close-to-life characters, prominent among them his narrator-figures in whom self-interested materialism coexists with a poignant faith in the revolutionary project.Jeremy Hicks’s translations of sixty-five of Zoshchenko’s short stories – many of them new in English – reveal a more subtle writer than has previously been on view, and one belonging most definitely to the classic Russian comic tradition.‘Hicks has breathed new life into Zoshchenko, providing, in many places, some of the best translations of his stories to date.’ –Gregory Carleton, Slavonica‘Jeremy Hicks, the translator and editor of this unique, and so far the most comprehensive, collection of Zoshchenko’s short stories, describes at some length Zoshchenko’s idiosyncratic and discordant mixture of propaganda cliché, newspaper-speak, corrupted loan-words, confused party slogans, sentimental endearments, obscenities, garbled Marxist doctrines and snatches of colloquial speech spiced with malapropisms and tautology … All this turns the translator’s task into a high-wire act that Hicks performs with the utmost linguistic inventiveness.’ – Zinovy Zinik, Times Literary Supplement

Theodor Storm’s fictional achievement goes well beyond the celebrated Novelle Der Schimmelreiter (The Dykemaster in Denis Jackson’s translation published in Angel Classics). This selection of three more of his most impressive narratives, two of them appearing in English for the first time, represents three stages in the development of a German writer whose best work ranks with that of Thomas Hardy. Immensee (1850), a love-story whose powerful atmosphere is heightened by all-pervasive symbols and folksong-like verse, has long been a favourite of both the German- and English-speaking worlds. Journey to a Hallig (1871) is the free-roving story of a journey in more than one sense, both a magical evocation of the German North Sea coast in high summer and a layered account of an inner journey back into an old man’s past. Hans and Heinz Kirch (1882), one of Storm’s masterpieces, is a tragic tale of father-son conflict set among the Kleinbürger mercantile community of the German Baltic seaboard.

Denis Jackson’s absorbing introduction and end notes, and maps to two of the stories, will enhance the reader’s enjoyment of this poetic, eloquent fiction which is so strongly rooted in time and place.

‘The three stories chosen illustrate the development of Storm’s style from the early period when he  “painted in watercolours” to the more realistic later period when he “began to paint in oils”. Particularly welcome is the translation of Hans and Heinz Kirch, one of Storm’s major works, here rendered into English for the first time. The translator’s introduction provides a brief but informative survey of Storm’s life and work and places it in the context of the turbulent politics of the time … Useful maps and 30 pages of end notes are an excellent guide for English speakers unfamiliar with German history and culture. What impresses most of all, however, is the outstanding quality of the translations, which contrive to read like natural English and yet capture beautifully the sense and rhythm of Storm’s German.’ – Forum for Modern Language Studies

Der Schimmelreiter (1888), here translated as The Dykemaster, is one of the most celebrated works of classic German fiction. Denis Jackson’s new translation, the first for many years, sets out to recreate the full impact of Theodor Storm’s masterpiece – a task in which no previous English version has succeeded. The Dykemaster is the tale of a visionary young north Frisian Deichgraf of the eighteenth century, creator of a new form of dyke. The short-sighted and self-seeking community with which he is at odds turns him into a phantom, seen riding his grey along the dyke whenever the sea threatens to break through. The rationalistic storyteller, in a sophisticated narrative structure, belongs to a later age, and what he relates is a veiled critique of the dyke officials of his own day.

The eerie west Schleswig-Holstein coast, with its vast hallucinatory tidal flats, hushed polders and terrifying North Sea, is the setting for a tale which grips from first page to last with its dynamic tensions and shifts of focus, mood and pace. Storm’s dense narrative further invites the reader to ask whether progress is possible, how the historical record is established, what parts are played by the rational and the irrational in human existence.

‘this tremendous tale, with which Storm took his conception of the Novelle, as epic sister of drama, to unprecedented heights …’ – Thomas Mann

‘This is a marvellous work … There is nothing better in German fiction prior to the work of Thomas Mann.’ –Kirkus Reviews

‘Translations of the high standard of this one are more than ever in demand.’ –  Mary Garland, editor of The Oxford Companion to German Literature