The Golden Pot

“Hoffmann’s influence ranges far beyond Freud: Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nikolai Gogol, Oscar Wilde and Franz Kafka all seem impossible without his precedent … I could list plausible comparisons all day and night (see above), but The Golden Pot is simply unlike anything else I have ever read.” — Justin Taylor, The Washington Post”…the translation is pitch perfect, conveying the fluid passage between quotidian reality and its poetic hinterland.” – Joanna Neilly, Times Literary Supplement“The Hoffmann stories that stand out today are those in which primal fear intersects with—indeed, is stoked by—a society undergoing changes that baffle its inhabitants … Given his work’s deft amalgamation of fear and awe, it’s no wonder that the stories in this collection speak to the anxieties of the 21st century.” – Kevin Canfield, New Myths

Prussian-born E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) was one of the most influential authors of the German Romantic era. An artistic polymath with a fierce passion for music, Hoffmann spent much of his life struggling to reconcile his career as a bureaucrat with his commitment to his art. His stories, renowned for their combination of fantastic and macabre elements with twisting psychological realism, are often preoccupied with themes of artistic madness and the blurring of lines between the real and supernatural. His works exercised a profound influence on writers such as Balzac, Poe, Dostoevsky, and Kafka, as well as composers such as Schumann, Offenbach and Tchaikovsky.

Translator Peter Wortsman is the author of several short fiction collections and plays, an essay collection, and a travel memoir Ghost Dance in Berlin. His translations from the German include works by Peter Altenberg, Heinrich Heine, Robert Musil, Adelbert von Chamisso, Heinrich von Kleist, the Brothers Grimm and Franz Kafka.

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