ABSTRACT
The music, drawings, tales, and essays of E. T. A. Hoffmann form the myriad antic traces of a bifocal and twilight existence tethered between the myopic daylight of the Prussian judiciary and the sweeping night vision of German Romanticism. Martyn Clarke's translation alters the exclamatory nature of Hoffmann's rhapsodic observations by replacing the superlatives "kuhnsten" and "sonderbarsten" with the Latinate adjectives "audacious" and "extraordinary”. Hoffmann's theme of a utopian Marchenwelt was to remain pervasive throughout his tales; he often associates this other world explicitly with music. Much of the critical rhetoric of Hoffmann and the subsequent generation of German critics describes the music of Beethoven in terms of a deep and almost disturbing engagement. David Charlton's editorial presence permits the reader to assume a relaxed yet purposeful gait, somewhere between the systematic crawl of the scholarly reference work and the serendipitous meandering of a suggestive anthology.
