Zettel's dream

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Zettel's dream in the study edition, Suhrkamp Verlag , Frankfurt am Main 2010
Double page of the first edition

Zettel's Traum ( ZETTEL'S TRAUM in the author's spelling) is the monumental work by the author Arno Schmidt , published in 1970 .

title

The title alludes, among other things, to the weaver Niklaus Zettel from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night 's Dream . In the translation by Christoph Martin Wieland from 1762, the piece is called Ein St. Johannis Nachts-Traum . Nick Bottom ( Bottom = “ball”), whose name Wieland translated with a piece of paper using a technical term from the textile industry, says in the 4th act, 1st scene: “I want to ask Peter Sequence to make a song out of this dream; he should be called Zettel's dream ... "and in Shakespeare:" I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom's Dream, because it hath no bottom; ... ".

content

The action takes place on a summer day in 1968, which the four main characters spend from 4 a.m. until the following morning in the village of Ödingen in the Celler Ostheide . The first-person narrator Daniel Pagenstecher has the translator couple Paul and Wilma Jakobi with their daughter Franziska visiting. The adults talk about the American writer Edgar Allan Poe , whose life and work Pagenstecher interprets using the etym theory he developed . With this further development of Freudian psychoanalysis he arrives at a gloomy psychogram of Poe, which he depicts as an impotent, coprophilic , syphilitic voyeur with a tendency towards nannies .

The work comprises 1334 DIN A3 pages written in three columns with typewriter and hand (marginal glosses & deletions) and is divided into eight books:

  • 1st book: The Schauerfeld, or the language of Tsalal (up to page 138)
  • Book 2: In the company of trees (up to page 313)
  • 3rd book: Dän's Cottage. (A diorama) sic (up to p. 489)
  • 4th book: The gesture of the Great Pun (up to f. 600)
  • 5th book: Franziska = Nameh (up to page 755)
  • 6th book: 'Rohrfrei!' - (up to sheet 961)
  • 7th book: The tw / oilit of the God / uts (up to sheet 1145)
  • 8th book: Im Reiche der Neith (up to f. 1330)

Edition history

First edition

Zettel's Traum was published in 1970 in a signed edition limited to 2000 volumes in A3 format by Stahlberg Verlag . The book met with so much interest that the very expensive first edition was sold out after a few months.

Much to the annoyance of the author, a Berlin collective of pirated printers produced a pirated print in a reduced size in the autumn of 1970 . Arno Schmidt saw his precarious existence threatened, as his publisher did not want to risk another typescript edition if continued pirated printing was to be expected.

Until 2010, Zettel's Traum was only available in differently scaled facsimile editions of the original typescript. In 2002, S. Fischer Verlag published a reading edition that almost came close to the original dimensions of the work.

In October 2010, appeared in the publishing house Suhrkamp the "Bargfelder output. Work group IV / 1. Standard edition. Zettel's Traum ”as a set book. Friedrich Forssman worked on this for a number of years.

expenditure

  • Zettel's Traum - first edition in A3 format, Stahlberg Verlag , 1970.
  • Zettel's Traum - facsimile edition of the manuscript (45 cm), 3rd edition, Verlag S. Fischer (license from Goverts-Krüger-Stahlberg-Verlag, Stuttgart), 1977
  • Zettel's dream - facsimile reproduction on 32 × 23.5 cm, S. Fischer Verlag 2002, ISBN 3-596-50560-7 .
  • Zettel's Traum - Bargfelder Edition. Work group IV: The late work: Volume 1, Suhrkamp Verlag 2010, ISBN 978-3-518-80310-3 .

Audio book

translation to English

A translation of Zettel's Traum into English by John E. Woods was published in 2016 under the title Bottom's Dream .

Literature and documents

  • Arno Schmidt: Preliminary to Zettel's dream. Record cassette with 2 long-playing records, 16-page text booklet, a drawn diagram and 9 facsimile pages in original size, S. Fischer Verlag, 1977.
  • Jan-Frederik Bandel: Waiting for “Zettel's dream”. Textem, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-941613-44-7
  • Jörg Drews , Doris Plöschberger (Ed.): "The poet's eye rolling in fine madness ..." Documents and studies on "Zettel's dream". Text & criticism, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-88377-658-0 .
  • Michael Manko: The “red threads” in Zettel's dream. Literary sources and their processing in Arno Schmidt's masterpiece. Dissertation Dortmund 2000. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2001, ISBN
  • Volker Langbehn: Arno Schmidt's Zettel's dream: An analysis. Camden House, Rochester 2003, ISBN 1-57113-261-9 .
  • Doris Plöschberger: Silbm arts & letter villains! On the aesthetics of masking and metamorphosis in Arno Schmidt's “Zettels Traum” (= contributions to recent literary history, vol. 191). Winter, Heidelberg 2002, ISBN 3-8253-1418-9 .
  • Gregor Strick: “At the limits of language”. Poetics, poetic practice and psychoanalysis in “Zettel's Traum”. To Arno Schmidt's Freud reception. Text & criticism, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-88377-434-0 .
  • Dieter Stündel: Register for Zettel's dream. An approximation. Text & criticism, Munich 1974.

Web links

Commons : Zettel's Traum  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Arno Schmidt: Bottom's Dream. Translated by John E. Woods. Dalkey Archive, Victoria TX 2016, ISBN 978-1-62897-159-0 ( information from Dalkey Archive Press, accessed January 25, 2017).