FORERUNNER OF KAFKA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 632, 10 August 1951, Page 13

FORERUNNER OF KAFKA

TALES FROM HOFFMANN, edited by J. M. Cohen; the Bodley Head. Enflish price, 16/-. M. COHEN, who translated Don * Quixote in its new Penguin edition, has collected here five of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s major tales. There has been no new edition of Hoffmann for 50 years, although his name is a byword for the supernatural and the macabre, and Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann is only one of a number of musical works his writings inspired. The tale of mystery and. imagination was really Hoffmann’s invention, but by applying the Hoffmann formula to themes more in keeping with his times, Mr. Cohen points out in his introduction, Edgar Allen Poe was at least partially responsible for his predecessor’s eclipse. Hoffmann is even more significant today, Mr. Cohen suggests, 4 ape first of (continued on page 1

(continued from page 13) the hallucinated-the forerunner of Kafka and Rilke. The stories collected here substantiate this view. There is "The Deed of Entail" (translated by the editor), a tale of a ghost-haunted castle which might have been directly inspired by Horace. Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, written 50 years earlier; "The Golden Pot" (in Carlyle’s translation), the story of an artist who rejects ordinary society for a private world of salamanders and snake women; the gruesome "Story of Krespel" and his violin; and "The Sandman," which includes the puppet figure Coppelius of ballet fame. Hoffmann was» in some ways a better craftsman than Poe. His backgrounds are always detailed and authentic, which gives his horrors greater impact. His emanations of evil are overpowering, and sometimes evil triumphs, as it does in "The Sandman." The illustrations by the 17th Century French artist Gavarni are extremely

apt:

P.J.

W.