Mike Mitchell's new translation replaces S. Goodrich's 1912 version of the first German bestselling novel. Simplicissimus is the eternal innocent, caught in the middle of the Thirty Years War.
A satirical novel of the Baroque style, written in 1668 by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen and published the subsequent year. Inspired by the events and horrors of the Thirty Years' War which had devastated Germany from 1618 to 1648, it is regarded as the first adventure novel in the German language. It may contain autobiographic elements using as its basis Grimmelshausen's experience in the war. REVIEWS "This is Germany's first-ever bestseller, republished and translated more than 200 times. Brecht took Mother Courage out of it, and it receives a mention in one of John Le Carre's novels. It is a violent and often all-too-realistic picaresque, set in war-torn Europe during the 17th-century Thirty Years War. Simplicissimus is the eternal innocent, the simple-minded survivor, and we follow him from a childhood in which he loses his parents to the casual atrocities of occupying troops, through his own soldiering adventures, and up to his final vocation as a hermit alone on an island. It is Rabelasian in some respects, but more down to earth and melancholy." Phil Baker in The Sunday Times "It is the rarest kind of monument to life and literature, for it has survived almost three centuries and will survive many more. It is a story of the most basic kind of grandeur - gaudy, wild, raw, amusing, rollicking and ragged, boiling with life, on intimate terms with death and evil - but in the end, contrite and fully tired of a world wasting itself in blood, pillage and lust, but immortal in the miserable splendour of its sins." Thomas Mann
Short-listed for The Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2000
Grimmelshausen (1621-1676) had a very eventful and picaresque life. He spent fourteen years in the Thirty Years War, finally turning to fiction. Mike Mitchell is one of the most gifted translators of his generation, winner and shortlisted twice for The Schlegel-Tieck German Translation Prize and shortlisted twice for The Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
Mike Mitchell's new translation replaces S. Goodrich's 1912 version of the first German bestselling novel. Simplicissimus is the eternal innocent, caught in the middle of the Thirty Years War.The novel follows a boy from the Spessart named Simplicius in the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years War as he grows up in the depraved environment and joins the armies of both warring sides, switching allegiances several times. Born to an illiterate peasant family, he is separated from his home by foraging dragoons and is eventually adopted by a forest hermit. He is conscripted at a young age into service, and from there embarks on years of foraging, military triumph, wealth, prostitution, disease, travels to Russia, and countless other adventures.
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