Reading and Discussion of Arno Schmidt’s Bottom’s Dream
Green Apple Books on the Park | 1231 9th Avenue (at Irving) | San Francisco, CA
A discussion with Volker Langbehn, Professor of German at San Francisco State University, about the new release of German author Arno Schmidt’s Bottom’s Dream, translated by John E. Woods. The book has been called “the German Finnegan’s Wake”, and weighs in at a staggering 1500 pages. Since its publication in 1970, the book has been regarded as Arno Schmidt’s magnum opus, the definitive work of a titan of postwar German literature.
Volker Langbehn is a professor of German at San Francisco State University and an expert in eighteenth- to twentieth-century German language and literature.
Arno Schmidt was a novelist, translator, and critic and was considered one of the preeminent Modernists of twentieth-century German literature. He was the author of more than twenty books and story collections, but made his living primarily as a translator of literature from English. Published in 1970, Bottom’s Dream (Zettels Traum) is considered his masterpiece: a more than 1,000-page novel focused on the mind and works of Edgar Allen Poe.
John E. Woods is a German translator living in Berlin who has translated several books by Arno Schmidt as well as contemporary authors Ingo Schulze and Christoph Ransmyr. He has also translated all of the major works by Thomas Mann.