Book description
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.
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. A new
translation of The Golem was published by Dedalus in 1995, and the first
English translations of The Green Face; Walpurgisnacht, The Angel of the
West Window, The White Dominican, The Opal (and other stories), were
published by Dedalus during 1991-94 making all of Meyrink's major work
available in English. Mike Mitchell 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. His translations have been shortlisted three times for
The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize:Simplicissimus by Johann
Grimmelshausen in 1999, The Other Side by Alfred Kubin in 2000 and The
Bells of Bruges by Georges Rodenbach in 2008. His biography of Gustav
Meyrink:Vivo:The Life of Gustav Meyrink was published by Dedalus in
November 2008. He has recently edited and translated The Dedalus Meyrink
Reader.
