Walpurgisnacht

by Gustav Meyrink, Mike Michell (Translator)

Overview

Comic, fantastic and grotesque, Walpurgisnacht uses Prague as the setting for a clash between German officialdom immured in the ancient castle above the Moldau, and a Czech revolution seething in the city below. Written in 1917, Walpurgisnacht continues the message of The Green Face, of a decadent society on the brink of collapse and of a Europe past salvation. In it we see Meyrink's exceptional narrative powers at their height.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781907650420
Publisher:	SCB Distributors
Publication date:	08/01/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

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.

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 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.

Read an Excerpt

The marriage ceremony was over. Jubilation echoed round the cathedral, drowning a faint whimpering. Polyxena did not dare turn round to see; she knew what was happening.
"The crown!" The voice rang out again.
"The crown! The crown!" the cry was taken up from pew to pew.
"It's hidden at Countess Zahradka's," someone shouted. They all thronged to the door, a wild surge.
"To Countess Zahradka's! Countess Zahradka's! The crown! Fetch the royal crown!"
"It's made of gold, with a ruby at the front!" came a screech from the gallery: Bozena, who always knew everything.
"Ruby at the front," ran the description from mouth to mouth, and they were all as certain as if they had seen the crown with their own eyes.
A man climbed onto a plinth. Polyxena recognised the lackey with the vacant stare. He threw his arms about and screamed in such a rapacious frenzy that his voice cracked, "The crown is in Wallenstein Palace!"
No one was in doubt any more. "The crown is in Wallenstein Palace!"
Behind the howling mob marched the grim, silent figures of the 'Brothers of Mount Horeb', with Polyxena and Ottokar on their shoulders again, as on the way to the Cathedral. Ottokar was wearing the purple robe of Duke Borivoj and carrying his ivory sceptre.
The drum was silent.
Polyxena's gorge rose in a surge of hatred for this screaming rabble that could be roused to a frenzy of rape and plunder in a few seconds. 'Lower than wild beasts they are, and more cowardly than the worst cringing cur;' and with a deeply cruel sense of satisfaction, she imagined the end of it all, the inevitable end: the rattle of machine-gun fire and the mountain of corpses.
She glanced at Ottokar and gave a sigh of relief. 'He sees and hears nothing. It is like a dream to him. God grant him a quick death, before he wakes.'
She was completely indifferent to her own fate.

The gate of the Wallenstein Palace was firmly blockaded. The mob attempted to climb the walls, and fell back down with bloody hands: the top was all covered with broken glass and iron spikes.
One of the men brought a huge beam.
Hands grasped it.
Back and forward. Back and forward: the monster charged the obstacle again and again, splintering the oak doors with a dull thud until they were wrenched from the iron hinges and disintegrated.