Hermann Hesse is one of the most widely read German-language writers ever. He is most renowned for his literary works such as Demian, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game, yet he also made a name for himself as a painter. After the First World War, he learned to paint with watercolors. His paintings vividly depict Ticino’s landscape (Switzerland), where he lived from 1919 to 1962.
HIs art is a glimpse into the more intimate and hidden side of this great popular writer. On his psychoanalyst’s advice, a student of Carl Gustav Jung, Hesse at first reluctantly took up watercolors. Eventually, he came to enjoy painting so much that it became his favorite pastime. What attracted and fascinated him was the magic of nature and the expressive power of colors. He painted thousands of watercolors, mostly Ticino landscapes in vivid colors, and illustrated small books of poetry throughout his life.
One of Herman Hesse’s earliest novels, In the Old Sun (In der alten Sonne) was completed in 1904. The story is of novella length and comes long before the novels that were to make Hesse famous in the decades after World War II.
In his early years as a writer, Hesse turned memories of his childhood home of Cawl—called “Gerbersau,” after a favorite fishing spot on the Nagold River—into a steady flow of Novellen, which kept his coffers replenished; and the ranks of his reading public kept growing. “In der alten Sonne,” one of these recollective tales, was first published in Hesse’s Nachbarn (1908), a collection of five works of fiction about the natives of his birthplace.
The novel was first published in English in 1914 in Volume XIX of The German Classics: Masterpieces of German Literature by the German Publication Society. The twenty illustrated volumes in the series were edited by Kuno Francke. The publishing house, which was created specifically for this series, went bankrupt soon after the German U-boat sinking of the British ocean liner Lusitania in 1915. One outcome of the Great War was that America’s taste for German literature and culture dissipated overnight.
The translation by A[lexis] I[renée] du P[ont] Coleman is fairly modern. However, the text contains one slight error that merits correcting: the reference to one of the main characters, Heller, as a “sailmaker” is inaccurate; in the original German he is referred to as a Seiler, a rope maker. In addition to this correction, antiquated punctuation has been silently modernized.
Coyote Canyon Press is proud to bring back into print this “lost novel” by Hermann Hesse.
Coyote Canyon Press just published the first of two novels by Hermann Hesse, an endeavor we’re calling our Hermann Hesse Project. Just published is Gertrude. The text for this edition is taken from Adele Lewisohn’s translation of 1915, Gertrude and I, published in New York by The International Monthly.
Gertrude was the first novel by Hermann Hesse published in English and not part of an anthology. The novel deals with the destructive nature of love, its central theme the narrator’s enduring and hopeless passion for Gertrude, whom he meets through their mutual love of music. “Music was important to Hesse,” says Thomas Fasano, who wrote the Introduction to the book. “As a child he loved to listen to the church organ, learned to play the violin, and developed a passion for Chopin. His interest in music and painting and his lifelong association with musicians and painters greatly informed his writing.”
Fasano writes in the Introduction:
Hesse’s pre-World-War-I heroes are esthetes who live only in their own world of dreams, who shrink before bold action. Temperamental artists, they are paralyzed by their chronic indecision and consumed by loneliness—timid souls to whom the art of life and the art of love are forever unobtainable. They ask little of life and expect much. Such is the nature of the child of nature, Peter Camenzind, and the timorous composer, Kuhn. Such too was Hermann Hesse.
The second book in the Hermann Hesse Project will be a rediscovery of sorts: In The Old Sun, a novel published in English over one hundred years ago and essentially lost since then — until now. We’re planning a beautiful edition of the novel both in hardback and Kindle. In The Old Sun was actually Hesse’s first book published in English in the United States. It was part of an anthology called German Classics and has never been published as an individual book until now.
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