Till Eulenspiegel: His Adventures. - book reviews

While today dirty tricks, pranks, and practical jokes are the stuff of politics, in the German High Middle Ages and Renaissance, they were the stuff of folklore and literature. And the name most associated with these and other forms of bedevilment was Till Eulenspiegel, a supposedly "historical personage" said to have died in 1350, whose reputation survived him for nearly 250 years as he became a staple of popular literature in the form of Volksbucher and Schwankbucher (jest books). Sadly, Eulenspiegel's tales subsequently suffered significant bowdlerization that reduced them to harmless fairy tales intended not to offend even children, when in truth their original purpose had been to offend one and all, especially those in the governing classes who were so easily and repeatedly disarmed by the author-character's air of genuine naivete and innocence. Oppenheimer argues persuasively that his text offers no less an insight into the German national character (Eulenspiegel has been a German literary staple, albeit in truncated and censored versions, for five centuries) than Dante's Commedia does into the Italian, Don Quixote does into the Spanish, and Huckleberry Finn and Walden do into the American national characters.

Happily, more recent study of Eulenspiegel's tales has rescued them from the censors. Paul Oppenheimer's translation, the first full English translation of the tales, benefits from and continues this renewed interest in the tales as they were originally written. Oppenheimer's translation is a model of careful scholarship designed to meet the needs of more established scholars and those new to Eulenspiegel alike. The generous and clearly written introduction discusses the date and authorship of the tales, their sources and influence, and their artistic achievement. Oppenheimer also uses the introduction to lay out carefully his policies and procedures in editing and translating his source, the text of Johannes Gruninger's earliest known complete Middle High German edition of 1519, with interpolations from recently discovered earlier fragments and from Gruninger's subsequent but differing edition of 1519.

The translation provides the text of 95 talcs along with generous endnotes. It also reprints the 89 woodcuts that accompanied the text in the 1515 edition. Throughout, Oppenheimer serves both his text and his readers well. Thanks to his efforts Till Eulenspiegel can find once again the audience he so richly deserves.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Studies in Short Fiction
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group