Customer Reviews

The Golden Pot and Other Tales: A New Translation by Ritchie Robertson (Oxford World's Classics)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

E.T.A. Hoffmann is, in my opinion, one of the best and, sadly, unknown authors ever. I came across his name in a study of German Romanticism and even now whenever I want to escape this mundane reality I turn to his tales. Although known for the Nutcracker, his other tales are far more beautiful, moving and fantastic. The Golden Pot is perhaps the best story I have ever read. For anyone wishing so submerge him/herself in another world for a little while, a world of magic, beauty and horror, this is the best book one could choose. Each of his tales is unique, fantastic and exquisite.

I would like to take a moment to correct a very common misconception about E.T.A. Hoffmann...in all fairness to him, Hoffmann should not be known for writing The Nutcracker on which the ballet is based. The ballet is based on the version of the story written by Alexandre Dumas NOT Hoffmann! Hoffmann's version (the original, and the version Tchaikovsky thought he was writing the music for, until Petipa, the choreographer, decided it was too dark and strange to be made into a ballet and went with the sweet and fluffy Dumas version), is far superior and definiately worth reading even though it is one of his lighter tales. It's more fantasically strange and wonderful than dark and scary. It's also not as thought-provoking as some of his other works. If you're planning to read it I recommend the copy with Maurice Sendak's illustrations, as they set off the tone and mood of the story perfectly.

In regards to this particular book (The Golden Pot and others), I have found that everything Herr Hoffmann wrote is worth reading...it's just unfortunate that there aren't more collections of his works available. I've had a devil of a time trying to find a good hardbound copy myself!

In 1814, E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote one of the best novellas I have had the good fortune to read. Regrettably, I neither speak nor understand German, and I only read "The Golden Pot" in translation, but it still managed to enchant me.

It is a fairytale -- subtitled "A Fairytale for the Modern Times" -- and attempting to adequately summarize the story would be pointless, which its true for every masterpiece. At a very basic level, the story pits the world of reality against the world of imagination/magic/wonder/poetry. It would be more accurate to say that the latter is active within the former, unbeknownst to the well-to-do inhabitants of early 19th century Dresden. Reading the "Golden Pot" will make you feel it is a great pity that you are not a citizen of Dresden at the beginning of the 19th century. To us, early 19th century Dresden is a faraway magical place of its own right, and so the "modern fairytale" aspect is rather lost to the modern reader. It would have been a much more fulfilling read in 1814, as one would recognize the aspects of the mundane world that Hoffmann describes, and would be thus able to derive greater pleasure from the descriptions of the fantastical that he masterfully weaves hidden in plain sight within it. Hoffmann has chosen an ingenious approach to the relationship between the reader and the writer, best showcased in the seventh vigil (chapter).

This magical novella is required reading by everyone, alongside the works of Shakespeare and Goethe (yes, Western Canon, I know). So what are you waiting for?

E.T.A. Hoffmann was an enormously popular writer -- a 'best seller' internationally, though he never reaped the sort of profits JK Rowling has, nor did he live long enough to bask in his own fame -- throughout the century after his death in 1822. I have the impression that he isn't "read" so widely these days by anglophones, which has been my reason for searching out an effective translation to recommend. Ritchie Robertson has produced exactly what I hoped to find, a translation that captures both the surreal and the sardonic in Hoffmann's prose. This edition includes his most evocative fantasy, The Golden Pot, and four of his most intellectually intriguing satirical/hallucinatory romances.

I was lured into re-reading Hoffmann by way of music, specifically by becoming involved in the opera "Tales of Hoffmann" by Jacques Offenbach. ETA Hoffmann was himself a composer, though not a very good one, and a conductor. His stories have inspired two other enduringly popular musical masterworks, the ballets "The Nutcracker" and "Coppelia". His influence in literature has been equally enduring. Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne were both 'disciples' of Hoffmann; Poe in particular mimicked Hoffmann both in style and in content. Critics have suggested that Hoffmann was a major influence on the works of Baudelaire, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Kafka. I have no doubt at all that Bruno Schulz used Hoffmann as a model for his two 'surreal' masterpieces; I've already noted some parallel passages in my reviews of Schulz. The filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock explicitly attributed some of his own artistry to the influence of Hoffmann. Whether JK Rowling had in fact read or even heard of Hoffmann, I have no direct evidence. But her Harry Potter books are unimaginable without the tradition of macabre 'Gothic' romanticism that began with Hoffmann. Yes, of course there were tales of magic and fantasy before ETA Hoffmann, but they were innocent and unambiguous in comparison to the subtleties of The Golden Pot and Master Flea. The essence of Hoffmann's 'surreality' is the flabbergasting incongruity he evokes in juxtaposing ostentatiously gorgeous fantasies with an absurdly grungy everyday world. His supernatural beings are so phantasmagorical that the reader is almost compelled to believe they represent an evanescent surface over a truly present realm of supernaturalism, a mask of illusion covering a real face of mystery. Maks, by the way, are constant symbols in Hoffmann's tales. His quotidian is a Roman carnival. "Imagination" is the solidest mode of epistemology.

Though twenty-seven years younger, Hoffmann was effectively a 'contemporary of Goethe, and his role in the eruption of "romanticism" in European-American culture paired with Goethe's, for better or worse. One can argue, I think, that Goethe both rejected and extended the Enlightenment. Hoffmann plainly rejected. While Goethe was as much a scientist as a poet, Hoffmann dreaded and despised scientific rationalism. The villains in several of his tales carry the names of famous scientists and rational philosophers: the unsavory figures of Pepusch and von Leuwenhoek, in the story "Master Flea" turn out to be reincarnations of their historical namesakes. In that story and in others, Hoffmann pointedly declares that Reason is the enemy of Imagination: ""Thought destroyed intuition, but from the prism of the crystal, formed by the fiery flood in its nuptial conflict with the malevolent poison, intuition will radiate forth new-born, itself the foetus of thought!""

I have to confess that the anti-scientific, anti-rational aspects of 19th C Romanticism, still current in the reactionary first decade of the 21st C, dismay and daunt me. In other words, Hoffmann's influence, however seminal it really was, was pernicious. One can, at some risk of being ranted at, trace a line from Hoffmann's fantasies to Hitler's, from his anti-rational fairy tales to Wagner's nationalist mythologies to the irrational mythos of Nazism. But don't get upset! I'm not blaming Hoffmann for Hitler! I'm only suggesting that 'irrationalism' and the Gothic-Romantic imagination point down some rather dark pathways.

Hoffmann's tales are delightfully fanciful and funny. "The Golden Pot" is usually acknowledged as his best and most entertaining, and I suspect that readers will be entertained by it long after Harry Potter is forgotten, simply because Hoffmann was a better writer, with a more universal wit. Did Hoffmann himself truly trust the anti-rational, anti-Enlightenment notions expressed by his fantastical characters? Was Master Flea his sincere spokesman? One quality of Hoffmann's writing that you'll need to discover for yourself is his self-satirical ambivalence. In Hoffmann, everything -- ideas as well as incidents -- is only temporarily what it seems. Reality is what happens when you don't wake up in time.