RRP:  £11.95
BINDING: Paperback
PUBLISHED: 2012
ISBN: 9780946162864
PAGES: 176
Paperback original

Theodor Storm

A Doppelgänger; with Aquis submersus

Translated from the German by Denis Jackson; Introduction by Barbara Burns

This selection of Denis Jackson’s definitive series of translations of the novellas of Theodor Storm includes the little-known late masterpiece A Doppelgänger along with one of Storm’s most celebrated tales, Aquis submersus. In The Doppelgänger a reformed ex-prisoner finds himself an unemployable outcast, his crime having been a consequence of harsh economic conditions in mid-19-century north Germany. The stark events of his life, pieced together after his death, are in sharp contrast to his daughter’s tender childhood memories of him. Aquis submersus is the story of a love affair between a 17th-century portrait-painter and a subject of his, a landowner’s daughter, in an environment of bitter Junker hostility to his class.

THEODOR STORM (1817–88) was born in the small North Sea coastal town of Husum, where he established himself as a lawyer and spent almost his entire life apart from fifteen years of political exile. His fifty or so novellas grew out of his lyric verse, which includes some of the finest in the language. His intricately wrought, subtle narratives, strongly rooted in time and place, have long made him a favourite author of his fellow countrymen, and the English-speaking world has begun to accord him a place beside better known writers of other nations whose work has long been accepted as classic.

DENIS JACKSON’s other selections of Storm’s novellas published in Angel Classics are The Dykemaster (Der Schimmelreiter); Hans and Heinz Kirch, with ‘Immensee’ and ‘Journey to a Hallig’; Paul the Puppeteer, with ‘The Village on the Moor’ and ‘Renate’ (Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2005); Carsten the Trustee, with ‘The Last Farmstead’, ‘The Swallows of St George’s’ and ‘By the Fireside’; and Grieshuus: The Chronicle of a Family.