Bottom's Dream (German Literature Series) - Tapa dura

"Arno Schmidt . . . was an enormously talent in the fictional line of cruel comedy that runs from Rabelais through Swift and Joyce or to say it straight out: a major European novelist.""

"Reading Arno Schmidt can be addictive."

"A giant of postwar German literature."

"Arno Schmidt . . . was an enormously talent in the fictional line of cruel comedy that runs from Rabelais through Swift and Joyce or to say it straight out: a major European novelist." -"New York Review of Books"
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"A giant of postwar German literature." -"New York Times"

"Reading Arno Schmidt can be addictive."-"Times Literary Supplement"

"A truly witty and innovative writer." -"Chicago Tribune"

"Reading Arno Schmidt can be addictive." -"Times Literary Supplement"

..".In this world, as he writes, everything proves to be a "PHALIBILD . . . NOTHING BUT A PENIDIN." These elusive etyms are perhaps the true heroes of Schmidt's masterpiece, Bottom's Dream (1970). That book is in some sense Schmidt's response to Finnegans Wake; it is a sprawling novel about a brief period, from 4 A.M. to early the next morning, outwardly centered on a discussion of that American father of European modernism, Edgar Allan Poe. Written in three columns and published only as a facsimile of an idiosyncratic typography designed by the author, the "Dream" represents the ultimate but untranslatable challenge to any translator. Mr. Woods has already shown his ability to translate late Schmidt with his version of Evening Edged in Gold (1975). Let us hope that he will have an opportunity to attempt the impossible and give us an English Bottom's Dream too. Then Arno Schmidt will assume his rightful place in modern literature." -Jeremy Alder, New York Times

“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.