Immensee , livre ebook
65
pages
English
Ebooks
2018
Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage
Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus
Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement
Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement
65
pages
English
Ebook
2018
Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage
Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus
Publié par
Date de parution
01 janvier 2018
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9780714547596
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
Publié par
Date de parution
01 janvier 2018
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9780714547596
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
Immensee and Other Stories
Theodor Storm
Translated by Ronald Taylor, Bayard Quincy Morgan and Frieda M. Voigt
ALMA CLASSICS
alma classics ltd
London House
243-253 Lower Mortlake Road
Richmond
Surrey TW9 2LL
United Kingdom
www.almaclassics.com
Immensee first published in 1851
This translation first published by John Calder (Publishers) Limited in 1966
Viola Tricolor first published in 1873
This translation first published by John Calder (Publishers) Limited in 1956
Curator Carsten first published in 1877
This translation first published by John Calder (Publishers) Limited in 1956
This edition of Immensee and Other Stories first published by Alma Classics Limited (previously O neworld Classics Limited) in 2009
This new edition first published by Alma Classics Limited in 2015
Translation of Immensee © John Calder (Publishers) Limited, 1966
Translation of Viola Tricolor © Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. New York , 1956
Translation of Curator Carsten © Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. New York , 1956
Front cover image © George Noblet
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-459-7
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.
Contents
Immensee and Other Stories
Chronology
Part One: Immensee
Introduction to Immensee
Immensee
Part Two: Viola Tricolor and Curator Carsten
Introduction
Viola Tricolor
Curator Carsten
Notes
Im mensee a nd Other Stories
Chronology
1817 Born on September 14th in Husum, Schleswig.
1835–36 Completed his school education at the Katharineum in
Lübeck.
1837–42 Studied law at the universities of Berlin and Kiel.
1843 Return to Husum as a local government servant.
1846 Marriage to Constanze Esmarch.
1848–50 Schleswig-Holstein War of Liberation against Denmark.
1851 First published work: Sommergeschichten und Lieder , a
collection of poems and short stories, including Immensee.
1852 Forced departure from Husum. In the same year a further
collection of his poems was published.
1853–64 Service in the Prussian legal administration, first in
Potsdam, later in Heiligenstadt.
1861 Return to Husum as mayor .
1865 Death of his wife Constanze. The following year he married
Dorothea Jensen, a childhood friend.
1867 In St Jürgen and Eine Malerarbeit.
1871 Draussen im Heidehof (story).
1873 Viola Tricolor .
1877 Carsten Curator .
1879 Resignation from legal office and retirement to the Holstein
village of Hademarschen.
1880–88 Various stories including Zur Chronik von Grieshuus
(1883) and Der Schimmelreiter (1888) .
1888 Death of Storm on July 4th: his body was buried in the
family grave at Husum.
Part One: Immensee
Introduction to Immensee
T he stories and the lyrical poetry of Theodor Storm are as unproblematical as their author’s life was uneventful. He was born in 1817 in the little, grey fishing town of Husum, in the province of Schleswig, and ended his working days as governor of that same place. Only twice did he leave his native province for any extended time: as a student, when he had been to Lübeck, Kiel and Berlin, and as a patriot, when he was virtually forced into exile under the Danish occupation of Schleswig and did not return for eleven years. And at all times his life was governed by the values that one would expect to result in, or to be expressive of, such a mode of existence; on the personal plane, a devotion alike to the responsibilities and the joys of family life, and beyond this, an intense pride in the sturdy North German independence of his province, particularly in the face of Danish aggressiveness.
Both in its nature and in its scope his literary work is the proper complement to his life – sincere, honest, uncomplicated, direct. As a lyric poet he modelled his style on Eichendorff, from whom he received the vision of a world admittedly not perfect in its manifest forms – witness his poems of political protest – but assuredly God-given and thus true.
As a narrative writer he stands equally in the Romantic tradition in those stories – among them Immensee – that descend from the period of his most unmistakably personal lyric poetry, that is, between 1840 and 1865, but in later life the surface of his stories became harder and his tone of voice more severe.
At their most characteristic, both Storm’s lyric and narrative writings are sustained by a mood of reminiscence, of meditation, of “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. Their subjects are private and intimate, their justification and their validity personal; he himself characterized the novelettes composed in this spirit as “stories of situation”. Their strength lies in their honesty; their besetting danger is sentimentality – a sentimentality inseparable from their genesis in a desire to escape in the imagination from what Storm once called “this agonizing reality”. He softens the jagged outlines of this reality by drawing across them a veil of dreams and illusions, so that what he now observes, from an imagined distance in time or place, partakes of the quality of an ideal and loses much of the particularity of a “real”, here-and-now situation.
Immensee , written in 1849, belongs in this context – its characters live in the middle-class world of Storm’s experience, contain their activities within its approved, conventional limits, yet seem almost too frail, too weltfremd to represent life in that world or to deal with its real problems. The old man, sadly reminiscing on an unfulfilled past; the sensitive, romantic youth who collects flowers and writes poetry; the simple, virtuous, rather colourless girl of childhood memory, and her pragmatic, utterly unromantic mother – these are typical creatures of Storm’s poetic world. The tone is subdued, the manner unhurried, the outcome of the events unchallenged. The emotional range is narrow – but perhaps it is the concentration forced by this very narrowness that gives Storm his particular place of affection as a minor master in the German literature of the nineteenth century.
– Ronald Taylor
Immensee Translated by Ronald Taylor
The Old Man
O ne autumn evening an elderly, well-dressed man was seen coming slowly down the road. To judge from the dust on his old-fashioned buckled shoes, he was returning from a walk. The joy of his past youth shone in his dark-brown eyes which contrasted strikingly with his snow-white hair, and carrying his gold-topped cane under his arm he looked cheerfully at the surrounding scene and at the town that lay before him in the glow of the evening sunshine. He almost gave the impression of being a stranger, for although many of the passers-by felt drawn to look into his grave eyes, few exchanged greetings with him.
He stopped at last in front of a house with lofty gables, gave a final glance down the road and pushed open the gate that led into the courtyard.
As the bell rang, a green curtain was drawn aside from a small window overlooking the courtyard, and an old woman peered out. The old man motioned her with his cane.
“No lights yet?” he called, in a slightly southern accent.
The housekeeper lowered the curtain again. He crossed the broad courtyard, passed through a parlour, round whose walls stood oak dressers adorned with china vases, and went through the door opposite into a small lobby from which a narrow staircase led to the upper rooms at the back of the house.
Climbing the stairs slowly, he opened a door at the top and entered a spacious room. Here everything was quiet and secluded. One wall was almost entirely taken up by shelves and bookcases, while the other was hung with portraits and landscape paintings. A bulky armchair with a red velvet cushion was drawn up in front of a green-topped table, on which lay a number of open books.
Putting his hat and cane in a corner, he sat down and folded his hands in front of him as though to rest. It gradually became darker. As he sat there, a ray of moonlight shone through the window, lighting up the paintings, and involuntarily he followed its slow passage across the wall. Then it fell on a small portrait in a simple, black frame.
“Elisabeth!” he whispered. And as he uttered the name, he was transported back to his childhood…
The Children
Before long he saw in his mind the figure of a charming young girl come into the room. Her name was Elisabeth, and she must have been about five years old, while he was twice that. Round her neck she wore a red silk scarf that set off her attractive brown eyes.
“Reinhard,” she cried, “we’ve got the day off from school, the whole day! And tomorrow as well!”
Reinhard, who already had his slate under his arm, quickly put it down behind the door, and the two children ran through the house into the garden, then out into the fields. The unexpected holiday was just what they wanted, for here Elisabeth had helped Reinhard build a hut out of turfs, in which they were going to spend the summer evenings; the only thing missing was a seat. The nails, the hammer and the planks were already there, so he went straight to work.
In the meantime Elisabeth walked along by the embankment and collected in her apron the ring-shaped seeds
