Yorick's sensitive journey through France and Italy

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Yorick's sensitive journey through France and Italy is a novel by the Irish-English author Laurence Sterne , published in London in 1768 under the title A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy . The novel remained unfinished as the author died a few days after the first chapters were published before he could complete his novel.

Sterne himself has made several trips to France and Italy because of his unstable health, which he was able to finance through the great success of Tristram Shandy .

content

Angelika Kauffmann . Yorick, Madame de L. and the Monk from Calais, Scene from the Sensitive Journey, 1780

Reverend Yorick, the author's first -person narrator and alter ego , is going on a trip to France and Italy for health reasons. He rents a carriage, hires a servant and doesn't get far beyond Paris on his journey when the text ends suddenly.

In a series of highly entertaining episodes, Sterne lets the reader participate in the experiences of the first-person narrator Yorick, his sensual impressions and emotional feelings that accompany his mostly erotic adventures, although these adventures rarely go beyond the preliminary preparations.

The book is less eccentric than Stern's great novel Tristram Shandy, which some authors want to see completed through Sternes Sensitive Journey, and the staff of which Yorick occasionally refers to.

reception

Since its publication, the novel has not only been very popular in England, it was translated into German in the same year and was just as successful here. Under his influence, a separate genre of travel literature, that of sensitive travel , developed in the second half of the 18th century . In contrast to the established travel reports, the authors of which describe the country and people, customs, customs and culture of the countries visited objectively and in more or less detail, the sensitive traveler is primarily concerned with his own subjective experiences, his physical and mental reactions and his personal opinions .

The musician and publisher Johann Joachim Christoph Bode translated Sternes novel into German as Yorik's Sensitive Journey in 1768, and the novel was as successful in Germany as it was in England. The word sensitive was a neologism that Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Bode had proposed as a translation for sentimental (sentimental journey), and which was subsequently carried over to the entire epoch of sensitivity .

In 1769 a continuation of the novel came out under the pseudonym Eugenius , (that is John Hall-Stevenson), with an anonymous printer. The sequel could not reach the level of the original. In the German translation it has been greatly shortened and edited.

expenditure

  • Yorick's sensitive journey through France and Italy, along with a continuation by a friend. From the English by JJ Chr. Bode . 1769; The other library, Nördlingen 1986 ISBN 3-8218-4463-9
  • Yorick's journey of the heart through France and Italy. Translation by Helmut Findeisen. Dieterich, 1956; Insel, Frankfurt 1977
  • A sensitive journey through France and Italy. Complete edition, trans. based on the transfer of JJ Bode by Siegfried Schmitz; Epilogue dsb. - Ill. Tony Johannot . Winkler, Munich 1963, 1996 ISBN 3-538-05193-3 ; again Scientific Book Society WBG, Darmstadt 1979, 1985 (without ISBN)
  • A sensitive journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick . New from English transl. by Michael Walter . Berlin: Galiani 2010.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lawrence Sterne: A Sentimental Journey and Other Writings , ed. by Ian Jack and Tim Parnell, Oxford 2008, p. 233. ISBN 978-0-19-953718-1