Caspar Hauser - Softcover

Constantine, David J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 185224299X ISBN 13: 9781852242992

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 1994

Synopsis

The subject of Constantine's fifth book of poems is the enigmatic German Caspar Hauser, who was incarcerated for most of his childhood, released, and then murdered. He appeared in Nuremberg in 1828, able to write his name and say without understanding it one sentence: "I want to be a rider like my father was". Taken in by well-wishers one of whom fell in love with him he was attacked with a razor by an unknown assailant. Three years later, the eccentric Lord Stanhope made him his ward and left him in another town to go travelling. In 1833 he was killed. Constantine's epic poem unravels the strange strands of Caspar's short life. He touches on the intrigues of the time (Caspar may have had a claim to the throne of Baden), but his cantos are mainly concerned with Caspar's innocence and the extraordinary reactions of his untried nervous system to a new life in daylight, and the longings and hopes he awakened in others.

About this title

About the Author

David Constantine was born in 1944 in Salford, Lancashire. He read Modern Languages at Wadham College, Oxford, and lectured in German at Durham from 1969 to 1981 and at Oxford from 1981 to 2000. He is a freelance writer and translator, a Fellow of the Queen’s College, Oxford, and was co-editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2004 to 2013. He lives in Oxford and on Scilly. He has published ten books of poetry, five translations and a novel with Bloodaxe. His poetry titles include Something for the Ghosts (2002), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award; Collected Poems (2004), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Nine Fathom Deep (2009); and Elder (2014). His eleventh collection, Belongings, is published by Bloodaxe in 2020. His Bloodaxe translations include editions of Henri Michaux and Philippe Jaccottet; his Selected Poems of Hölderlin, winner of the European Poetry Translation Prize, and his version of Hölderlin’s Sophocles, combined in his new expanded Hölderlin edition, Selected Poetry (2018); and his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Lighter Than Air, winner of the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. His other books include A Living Language: Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures (2004), his translation of Goethe’s Faust in Penguin Classics (2005, 2009), his monograph Poetry (2013) in Oxford University Press’s series The Literary Agenda, and his co-translation (with Tom Kuhn) of The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht (W.W. Norton, 2018). He has published six collections of short stories, and won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2013 for his collection Tea at the Midland (Comma Press), and is the first English writer to win this prestigious international fiction award. Four other short story collections, Under the Dam (2005), The Shieling (2009), In Another Country: Selected Stories (2015) and The Dressing-Up Box (2019), and his second novel, The Life-Writer (2015), are published by Comma Press. His story 'Tea at the Midland' won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2010, while 'In Another Country' was adapted into 45 Years, a major film starring Tom Courtney and Charlotte Rampling.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 185224299X
• ISBN 13: 9781852242992
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96