The Life of Courage: The Notorious Thief, Whore and Vagabond PDF
Preview The Life of Courage: The Notorious Thief, Whore and Vagabond
The Life of Courage A map of the main towns and countries in ‘Courage’. The state boundaries are modern. Johann Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen Jfife of Courage: the notorious f/hief ^hore and Vagabond Translated with an introduction and chronology by Mike Mitchell THE ARTS COUNCIL Dedalus OFENGLAND Published in the UK by Dedalus Ltd, Langford Lodge, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs,PE28 5XE email: [email protected] ISBN 1 873982 56 9 Dedalus is distributed in the United States by SCB Distributors, 15608 South New Century Drive, Gardena, California 90248 email: [email protected] web site:www.scbdistributors.com Dedalus is distributed in Australia & New Zealand by Peribo Pty Ltd, 58 Beaumont Road, Mount Kuring-gai N.S.W. 2080 email: [email protected] Dedalus is distributed in Canada by Marginal Distribution, Unit 102, 277 George Street North, Peterborough, Ontario, KJ9 3G9 email: [email protected] web site: www.marginal.com Dedalus is distributed in Italy by Apeiron Editoria & Distributione, Localita Pantano, 00060 Sant’Oreste (Roma) email: [email protected] First published by Dedalus in 2001 Translation copyright © Mike Mitchell 2001 The right of Mike Mitchell to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd Printed in Finland by WS Bookwell This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request. THE TRANSLATOR Mike Mitchell is one of Dedalus’s editorial directors and is responsible for the Dedalus translation programme. His publi cations include The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy: the Meyrink Years 1890-1932; Harrap’s German Grammar and a study of Peter Hacks. Mike Mitchell’s translations include the novels of Gustav Meyrink and Herbert Rosendorfer, The Great Bagarozy by Helmut Krausser, Simplicissimus by Grimmelshausen and The Road to Darkness by Paul Leppin. His translation of Letters Back to Ancient China by Herbert Rosendorfer won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck German Transla tion Prize. êâstWglanâjâïfé German Literature from Dedalus Dedalus features German Literature in translation in its programme of contemporary and classic European fiction and in its anthologies. Undine - Fouqué £6.99 The Life of Courage — Grimmelshausen £6.99 Simplicissimus — Grimmelshausen £10.99 The Great Bagarozy — Helmut Krausser £7.99 The Other Side - Alfred Kubin £9.99 The Road to Darkness — Paul Leppin £7.99 The Angel of the West Window — Gustav Meyrink £9.99 The Golem — Gustav Meyrink £6.99 The Green Face — Gustav Meyrink £7.99 The Opal (& other stories) — Gustav Meyrink £7.99 Walpurgisnacht - Gustav Meyrink £6.99 The White Dominican - Gustav Meyrink £6.99 The Architect of Ruins - Herbert Rosendorfer £8.99 Letters Back to Ancient China — Herbert Rosendorfer £9.99 Stephanie — Herbert Rosendorfer £7.99 Anthologies featuring German Literature in translation: The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy - editor M. Mitchell £10.99 The Dedalus Book of German Decadence - editor R. Furness £9.99 The Dedalus Book of Surrealism - editor M. Richardson £9." Myth of the World: Surrealism 2 — editor M. Richardson £9.99 The Dedalus Book of Medieval Literature - editor B. Murdoch £9.99 Forthcoming titles include: The Dedalus Book of German Fantasy: the Romantic and Beyond — editor M. Raraty £10.99 Introduction Grimmelshausen quickly followed up the success of Simplicissimus (1668, though dated 1669) with a number of other books to which he himself refers in the foreword to the last as the ‘Simplician writings’. Probably the best of these — and certainly nowadays, since Brecht’s appropriation of the heroine, the best- known — is The Life of Courage, the Notorious Thief Whore and Vagabond, which appeared in 1670. All these books were published under elaborate ana- grammatic pseudonyms (German Schleifheim von Sulsfort, Philarchus Grossus von Trommenheim, Michael Rechulin von Sehmsdorf) and the identity of Grimmelshausen as author was not established until 1835. The Life of Courage is conceived as A Counterblast to Simplicissimus. Courage is the woman with whom Simplicissimus has an affair, then discards as a ‘man-trap . . . whose easy virtue soon disgusted’ him. Neither her name, nor the means by which he gets rid of her are mentioned in Simplicissimus, but his nasty and embarrassing trick is described in some detail in Courage and is part of the fictional motivation for her recounting her life story. She does it, she tells us, to shame Simplicissimus by showing the world what a depraved woman he boasted of having had an affair with. This allows Grimmelshausen to make his heroine give a frank confession of all her misdeeds: cheating, lying, stealing and, above all, fornication. The claim of a serious purpose in using her story as a 9 JOHANN JAKOB CHRISTOFFEL VON GRIMMELSHAUSEN dire warning is really a piece of moral sticking plaster rather crudely applied in a note fron|vthe author at the end. The third of these ‘Sinlplician writings’, Der seltzame Springinsfeld (The strange life of Tearaway), starts with a meeting between Simplicissimus, Tearaway and ‘the author’ in which the latter tells how he met Courage and was conned into writing down her life story for her. Courage is in many ways the female counterpart to Simplicissimus. Like him, she is swept away in the wars as a young innocent and like him makes her way through the devastation of war-torn Germany by using her considerable talents, in her case her beauty, a nimble and resourceful mind and an extremely elastic conscience. Unlike Simplicissimus, who becomes involved in the war as a boy only after the battle of Nördlingen in 1634, Courage goes through almost the whole thirty years, from the initial Bohemian campaign of 1619—1620 to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. As in Simplicissimus^ Grimmelshausen again employs the device of the heroine’s mysterious par entage which, of course, turns out to be aristocratic. Although her father is only referred to by initial, as Count T, a nobleman who ‘had been the most powerful in the kingdom’ but had been forced to flee to Istanbul because of his rebellion against the emperor, the reference is clearly to Mathias Thurn, the leader of the Bohemian rebels. This device is borrowed from the courtly romances which Grimmelshausen, and his Spanish models, parodied. It is interesting to note that he also wrote a courtly 10
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