Long before Jules Verne wrote Around the World in Eighty Days, the German Romantic-era writer Jean Paul dreamt of a balloonist’s voyage when he included this novella as a “comical appendix” to his multivolume novel Titan in 1801. The nobleman Giannozzo one day hears someone say the word revenant and imagines how wonderful it would be to hover over the world like a ghost. He takes flight in a his balloon which he dubs the Quarantine Barrack, and from lofty heights he makes a spiteful survey of central European society at the end of the eighteenth century. Docking daily in different towns, Giannozzo introduces chaos into the formality of a court lunch by unleashing a flight of bats from his pocket, looms as a voyeur over an intimate tryst from the eye of a rotunda, alights at the Brocken peak, and devises a plan for a gallows jubilee, which lands him in prison and on trial.
This edition is extensively footnoted, both by the volume's ostensible editor (Jean Paul himself, or his authorly surrogate) and by translator David Dollenmayer, who has left no stone unturned in elucidating the book’s abundant cultural and historical references and allusions.
Jean Paul was the nom-de-plume of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (March 21, 1763–Nov. 14, 1825), a German writer of long novels noted for their digression, warmth, and humor. After several early satirical works (at the “vinegar-factory”, he would say), he hit a stride in the 1790s with The Invisible Lodge (1793), Hesperus (1795), Siebenkäs (1797), and Titan (1803). Several other titles by Jean Paul are presently available in the Empyrean Series: Three Dreams, Maria Wutz, Prefaces, Two Stories, and Biographical Recreations from the Cranium of a Giantess.
David Dollenmayer has translated works by Rolf Bauerdick, Bertolt Brecht, Elias Canetti, Peter Stephan Jungk, Michael Kleeberg, Stefan Klein, Marie-Luise Knott, Michael Köhlmeier, Perikles Monioudis, Anna Mitgutsch, Mietek Pemper, Moses Rosenkranz, Willibald Sauerländer, Hansjörg Schertenleib, Daniel Schreiber, and Martin Walser and is the recipient of the 2008 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize and the 2010 Translation Prize of the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York. He lives in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.
No. 41 in Empyrean Series
Sublunary Editions
Physical Info: 7x5x0.312 inches | 132 Pages | Paperback