This very amazing booklet I found in a local charity shop: charity shops with their masses of books brought in from apartment clearances, are genuine bonanzas for the happy hunter: among old hymnbooks, novels by Barbara Steel and Danielle Cartland (or is it the other way round?) and how to-manuals for lucky stroke survivers, you sometimes stumble over a gem like this one:
"The Condor" is an apparantly mousy booklet of 41 pages, published in 1946 in Vienna, at Amandus-Edition (off the market). It´s a novella by Austrian narrative writer
Adalbert Stifter and it´s in English; the front carton cover in light blue is illustrated with the author´s sketched profile. The translator is Patricia de Ferro. The text of the novella is prefaced by Monique Sandrier. The booklet is in a almost fine condition, mildly sun-bleached at the edges.
Adalbert Stifter has never been one of my favorites; we read Abdias, a ponderous and long-winded story about man and fate, at school and I missed empathizing. My first encounter with Adalbert Stifter was my last; maybe I was too young for a writer like this and I should give him a second chance in my mature years.
Der Kondor (originally written "Der Condor"), an early work, was first published in 1840, when the author was 35; it founded his fame as a very special and unique narrative writer in the German literary world. As the English preface to this fresh and smashing translation tells us, the plot is about a painter and his strugglings with life and science, lust and continence, love and art (some of Stifter´s leading leitmotifs throughout his complete work), told in a decidedly artistic way: Stifter, besides his writing career, was not only strongly interested in life sciences (an important aspect of this text, too), but an ambitious painter: the booklet is illustrated with one of his paintings called "clouds". Not an easy-to-read text, and as Ms Sandrier tells us: "The readers are invited to feel and see, rather than to understand."
Want to read the first sentence of the story in English? "At two o´clock on a beautiful moonlight night in June a cat strolled along the ridge of a roof, coquetting with the moon." While writing this on my blog, a love-sick cat is screaming loudly in the abandoned streets in the neighborhood - and it´s about 2 o´clock! Magic!
Adalbert Stifter, a cloth-weaver´son, was an alcoholic, suffered from cirrhoses and, while in hospital for medication, stubbed himself to death with a razor; he was 62.
Amazon offers you numerous copies of various editions of
Der Kondor: this is the complete text on the internet. As far as I know, I can offer you the only copy of an translation into English available on the internet. Collectors are friendly invited to send me an E-Mail. All books I present on this blog are for sale.
Achtung, Sammler: diese englische Übersetzung einer frühen Novelle Stifters íst äußerst rar und meines Wissens die einzige überhaupt, die im Internet angeboten wird; sie stammt aus dem Jahr 1946 und wurde bei Amandus-Edition, Wien, publiziert. Die Übersetzung besorgte Patricia de Ferro; das sehr kundige und empathische Vorwort verfasste Monique Sandrier; über beide Damen ist nichts weiter bekannt. Sammler mögen gerne Kontakt aufnehmen.
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