The Golem (Dedalus European Classics) [Paperback]

Gustav Meyrink (Author), Mike Mitchell (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2000 | Series: Dedalus European Classics

"A superbly atmospheric story set in the old Prague ghetto featuring The Golem, a kind of rabbinical Frankenstein's monster, which manifests iitself every 33 years in a room without a door. Stranger still, it seems to have the same face as the narrator. Made into a film in 1920, this extraordinary book combines uncanny psychology of doppelganger stories with expressionism and more than a little melodrama... Meyrink's old Prague - like Dicken's London - is one of the great creations of City writing, an eerie, claustrophobic and fantastical underworld where anything can happen." -- Phil Baker in The Sunday Times

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Gustav Meyrink (I868-1932) found worldwide critical and commercial acclaim with his first novel The Golem (I9I5), which prior to the Dedalus Meyrink programme has been the only work available in English. It established his reputation as the master of the occult and the grotesque.(He was the German translator of Dickens). His reputation declined in his last years but his work is now being reassessed in Germany & Austria, and he is now considered as one of the most important German language novelists of the 20th century . Dedalus is part of the European-wide movement championing Meyrink's work. A new translation of The Golem was published by Dedalus in 1995, and the first English translations of The Green Face; Walpurgisnacht, The Angel of the West Window, The White Dominican, The Opal (and other stories), were published by Dedalus during 1991-94 making all of Meyrink's major work available in English. In 2008 Dedalus published the first English language biography of Gustav Meyrink,Vivo: The Life of Gustav Meyrink by Mike Michell. In 2010 Dedalus will publish a further collection of Meyrink's short stories.

For many years an academic with a special interest in Austrian literature and culture, Mike Mitchell has been a freelance literary translator since 1995. He is one of Dedalus's editorial directors and is responsible for the Dedalus translation programme. He has published over fifty translations from German and French, including Gustav Meyrink's five novels and The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy. His translation of Rosendorfer's Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize after he had been shortlisted in previous years for his translations of Stephanie by Herbert Rosendorfer and The Golem by Gustav Meyrink. His translations have been shortlisted three times for The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize:Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen in 1999, The Other Side by Alfred Kubin in 2000 and The Bells of Bruges by Georges Rodenbach in 2008. His biography of Gustav Meyrink:Vivo:The Life of Gustav Meyrink was published by Dedalus in November 2008.

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Dedalus Limited (June 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1873982917
• ISBN-13: 978-1873982914
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #144,580 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A terrifying allegory about an artist trying to find himself..., August 18, 2008

By 

Luca Graziuso (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Golem (Dedalus European Classics) (Paperback)

I will do my utmost to complement Esther Nebenhzal's critique which has considerable merit and covers a lot of ground I do not wish to tread once over. I here wish to provide some insights into the making of The Golem by Meyrink so as to deepen our appreciation for the author and his most read novel.

The Golem was originally titled "The Eternal Jew" but later changed so as to highlight the mystical elements and gothic stirrings of the tale. ustav Meyrink wrote the book book while working on a project that sought to translate all of Dickens into German (The Czech republic was part of the Austrio-Hungarian empire). However, spurred by a deliberate desire to go beyond the surface of reality, he was to become subject to visionary experiences that led to a dialogue with the spirit world which is exposed to us in his novels and short stories. The Golem is the most widely read and successful, and to my knowledge the most lyrically urgent one as well. He tells us in his journals that the moment that he passed from thinking in words to thinking in pictures he became a writer. He has the prophetic depth of a William Blake, although the different traditions strain this parallel, they do converge at several points and in a variety of overlapping sensibilities.

Meyrink often experimented with hashish, yoga, sleep-deprivation, fasting and breathing rituals. He also drank gum arabic twice a day, a sap derived from the acacia tree which is sacred to the Jews and allegedly was used to build the Ark of the Covenent and the Sacred Tabernacle.
Meyrink studied the Cabala of course, but he was also well versed in Buddhist and Hindu philosophy in addition to having dabbled into Muslim meditative rituals. He devoured anything that could possibly offer him a peek into the eternal unknown. He was to become the founder of the Theosophical Order of the Blue Star. If the esoteric slant portrayed in the commentary deters you from reading the book it would be very unfortunate. The tale is written in a style that is firmly grounded in a social landscape and a graphic expressionism descriptive of late 19th centuray Prague: It stirs not so much because of its darkness but due to a stark clarity that transpires amid the auratic haze.

A list of amusing and prophetic characters run the full gamut of the fantastical and the melodramatic: the doppleganger and the Eternal Woman, the marionetteer and the hemaphrodite, the prostitute and the amnisiac, the deaf-mute silhouette artist and the pawnbroker. Lovers and criminals abound and the plot holds the strings to a puppet show whose marionettes pull away until they are no longer controlled by the hand that gave them life.
In essence The Golem is an exploration of the problem of identity. "A painful quest for that eternal stone that in some mysterious fashion lurks in the dim recesses of memory in the guise of fat". Poetic in its melodramatic allegorical purpose and perverse in its evocation of a feel for the metaphysical in everyday experiences, the reader finds himself before an artificial monster that has all the quirks of bourgouis values
and the indeterminacy of its stalemate.

The Golem is a folkloric trademark of Yiddish literature. A manlike monster of clay created by a rabbi, who also happens to be a student of the Cabala, whence by his inscribing the word EMETH on its brow (truth) gives life to it. By simply removing the first of these letters EMETH (truth) becomes METH (Death) and the negotiating is brought to a dense expanse. We can easily draw a connecting link with the myths of Paracelsean homunculus, the Sorcerer's apprenticeship and Frankenstein.

Today it ought to bewilder to edigy a mythic paradigm for students of cyborg literature and the techno-human state of nature we've virtually manufactured in our benighted postmodern reality.
If one looks for solace in this tale, it may be found in its satirical overexposure, its expressionistic distortions and colorful panoply of characteristics that make humans clueless ceatures that run away from their fate so as to take refuge in fate's lap.
The nightmarish atmosphere of mystical intuition stares at the reader in a soft yet penetrating picture that by fantastical adumbrations reveals itself to be more of a mirror than a canvas: such a looking-glass has a beyond that intimates a communion with the hyperreal.
In the words of Jorge Luis Borges "the Cabala found in the ghettos a suitable home for its strange speculations on the nature of God, the magical powers of letters and the possibility for initiates of creating a man in the same way that God created Adam. The homunculus was called the Golem...Gustave Meyrink uses this legend...in a dream like setting on the other side of the Mirror and he has invested it with a horror so palpable that it has remained in my memory ever since my first encounter with it."

I hope this story finds as many readers as Kafka, because it has just as much to teach us, and possibly the nightmares may shake us out of a slumber that has become lulled by the snoring of our collective imaginary oblivion. Credit to Robert Irwin who has divulged a sensible foray into the literature of Gustav Meyrink and in this Dedalus edition provides a succint and thorough introdution.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A journey into the unconsciouss, February 7, 2002

By 

Esther Nebenzahl - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Golem (Paperback)

The legend of the "Golem" had its origin in Jewish folklore and mysticism, and its reading ranges from a methaphysical interpretation to a child's tale. From the first perspective the Golem is seen as a mystical attempt to experience "imitato dei," God's power of creation and the transcendental nature of the ritual; on a more legendary perspective the Golem is seen as a man-like creature who was created by rabbi Loew from Prague, to protect the ghetto community from persecution and injustice. In Meyrink's novel, the Golem is used as a symbolic device, in an exploration of the problem of identity.

Considered a masterpiece of fantasy and expressionism, Meyrink's "The Golem" is an oneiric novel with a strong religious gothic tone, a mirror of Meyrink's intellectual pursuit and involvement in occultist movements. The main character and narrator, Athanasius Pernath drifts in a state of hypnagogia, his memory blocked from the past, desperately in search of his own identity -- "Who am I?" In his quest, the Golem will take Athanasius into an inner journey, in a shift from consciousness to unconsciousness. Meyrink also introduces the mystic and cabbalist concept of the "secret of intercalation" (Ibbur), a combination of God's determinative and guiding hand and of man's freedom of choice and responsibility.

It is a novel with a phantasmagorial plot and visionary settings, where characters are drifted by a reality outside their understanding. Some readers might find the journey altogether weird, abstract and surrealist. However, the magic of Meyrink resides exactly in an artistic vision which embodies infinite interpretations. His own words best illustrates his own perspective of life: "when men arise from their beds, they think they have shaken off sleep and they know not that they have fallen victim to their senses and are in the grip of a much deeper sleep than the one they have just left."

38 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I recommend Mitchell's translation, October 13, 2000

By 

J. Bielawski - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Golem (Dedalus European Classics) (Paperback)

I spent last several days comparing Mitchell's and Pemberton's translation to the German original for a project I'm working on and I strongly recommend Mitchell's version. Pemberton's is quite inaccurate and contains many errors which dull the impact of Meyrink's prose. There is not enough space here for a detailed comparison but as an example just try to figure out the layout of Pernath's and Savioli's apartments (that iron door!) based on Pemberton's translation: "if one unlatched the iron door to the basement - quite easy from above - it was possible, through my room, to reach the staircase..." In fact the door is quite easy to unlatch not from above but from the other side (that is, inside Savioli's studio) and then it is possible to reach the staircase by walking a corridor along (or past) Pernath's room, not through it.