The Night-Thoughts of Obstetrician Walther Vierneissel on His Lost Fetus-Ideal — Jean Paul (translation Matthew Spencer)

Now that I begin to mourn for lost ideals, I will doubtless cut nothing new from the same old cloth, but remain—as the anatomical tailors of physiology define man well enough—the only animal in possession of twin sets of cheeks, the posterior causing the anterior to blush needlessly. (Note 1)

O noble youth! If dreams of some future ideal drive you awake into the prosaic yawn of the present, weep with me and take my handkerchief; for the wonderful dreams I cherished as a fetus have been washed away, and the end of the longest sleep was also the end of a most beautiful dream. 

I had many reasons—as I will state afterwards—to dream of what I would become in the world someday, had I come into it through midwives; namely, a Jupiter on the land, a Neptune on the sea, a garden god in the Eden Garden, in short, always the tutelary spirit, always the genius loci… I write my name as Obstetrician Vierneissel now. 

Besides, my dreams were more conclusive, and it must astound those who were once mere fetuses, if I may continue, to see what little becomes of man: at most a count or an accountant—a father confessor or a son confessant—a barber of beards or a barber of boils—a gatekeeper, gamesman, or gamekeeper—a cartman or a cavalier—a statistician or an obstetrician—in short, in any case, a human being. 

But how different and how much greater are the prospects of a punctum saliens (Note 2) of an embryo, of a fetus! —I was barely twelve hours old and I had already grown such a big head out of that decisive nothingness, without the silly hors d’oeuvre of a body. I was all head—I was as eternity and perfection are represented, namely well-rounded; this presaged the future. My mother forswore (so much did my appearance preoccupy her) both food and husband, yea, first acquaintance made all else loathsome, and my first movements, like those which the great field marshals of our continent arouse, were reverse-peristaltic, forcing a surrender of her meals. 

A few days later, a good heart met a good head; —there was as yet no third member of my pium corpus (Note 3)— Hence, if both expanded as they began, I could have become a diphthong of Madonna and malapert, a diptych of Argus (Note 4) and angel, if not sextuply more.  

I was amazed then, after two weeks, to find myself as big as a millet seed, and after five, as big as a bean; if this rare stretchability continues, said I (as it did for nine months, with me growing from 1/100,000th of a grain to 500,000 grains in weight) then clouds will girdle you like a waistcoat, and your head will reach into a rarified atmosphere indeed; the giant Og (Note 5) would then have to hold Goliath aloft, if he, being dwarfed, wanted to kiss your hand.

The army recruiter’s tape measure has me now at 4 ½ feet 1 inch.  

And if a bodily Micromegas (Note 6) of your kind, I went on to say, is a Titan of both head and heart, then I’ll wager such an eighth wonder can work wonders, enlighten every man, entice every woman, and stomp anyone not having it dead into the ground. —O exquisite dreams of my one brief incubation, which Schiller (Note 7) in his ode to lost ideals so elegantly and expansively extols! 

In the seventh week, I easily sprouted a pair of arms and feet, things which I had so long grasped after and pursued, and with them I could handily grasp and pursue many things.

In the ninth, I resembled (the circle of perfection having already been squared) a man in miniature and a male withal; I immediately determined sex, both in general and mine in particular, and afterwards persisted in having it. Heaven, I foresee, with its patient institutions, will restore (complete) on earth what I had so quickly acquired in my seventh and ninth weeks, indeed I have many thoughts on the subject.

It might be at this time that my head looked about and found a torso joined to it almost as big as itself. Indeed, such a windy world whines about us, now that our trunk measures seven head-lengths and our head measures only the length of itself, that no intelligent fetus could but rather reasonably conclude: “If the body is to a large, round, human head nothing more than the flimsy stem of a true Adam’s or Aphrodite’s apple, and if the heart makes the score two out of three, then the fetus is a paragon and can make great things of itself.”

Greatness is observed when a man is born and grows. You need only weigh the heart of a healthy hundred pounder against a pound of flesh dead and buried, or count out the andante pulse of the elderly against a prestissimo fetus—take mine, for example—: and it is easy to understand (since the corporeal heart is a capsule for the spiritual) how I am now able to keep my cool against whole human regiments—burn with anger at a single individual—lead many by the ear and, indeed, set a few by them. But is this truly the heart that is promised to a fetus?

But properly, even if a young man in utero should become a wholly false magus of his own pre-nativity, even if he should become un diseur de mauvaise aventure (Note 8), he stays in the right, prophesying evil, like Jonah, without committing it. Here I pause on none other than the famous little animal tail that I, like everyone else, carried in our first few months (Note 9), and which can still be found on various dead specimens preserved in ethyl alcohol. At first such an exponent of animality—the prophesying tail of a comet, as it were—rightly escapes the notice of the noble civilized fetus; thereby, by the tail—so the fetus conjectures initially—he could duly hang with the guild of tailed apes, so much so that he could hang his tail out as a craftmark and trademark of Animal & Co. It seems to me that this minuscule youth, no matter how unlettered he is in natural history—of which he is more text than reader—with little sophistication and much innocence, he cannot but draw the conclusion that such an animal appendage or simian signature prefaced only too clearly his earthy future with title page or tailpiece. I see—says the silent fetus—that I have this end rhyme (bout rimé) behind me and before me, and will have to append it with suitable thoughts after my birth; the devil take it! Or course, every upstanding fetus—and who among us does not remain so after birth—later takes back his backbone as an anti-triumphal arch (much like the maturing flog transforms his own into hindlegs) pulling down the hated tavern sign of animality, cloistering it away, and donning a fleshly habit. So if a man later becomes, when he is born, a true-tailed baboon in life, he is only continuing his innocence, not of childhood but of the embryonic. 

But we moon for a room back in the womb. 

And now I think about how my domicile grew with me, and how quickly it did—for in the first month I lived in a mere warbler egg, from which I was promoted to a goose egg in the second; until I received an ostrich egg in the third—: so it must enter the head of a fetus, once he can think at all, that he will move from cloud-castle to cloud-castle, and finally into ethereal castles, and via the pelvic cavity to Dido’s Cave (Note 10), to Rosenmüller's Cave at Muggendorf (Note 11), and to the Cave of Montesinos (Note 12), ensouling as world-soul, if he does not overly flatter himself, the Orpheus-egg of the world. The fetus commits another equally forgivable error when he presupposes that one day, because he has taken nine months of lessons, he will become the smartest swimmer in the sea, and take on, as the crashing crescendo of his development, cetacean proportions.

—In the fourth month, I was already teething—, and regardless of whether the teeth helped me then, with my liquid diet, or later, when I was about in the world, I first needed to gum my way through my gums to receive them. 

I also equipped myself with the bones of the middle ear, though I had yet to lend mine to any lecturing; likewise, I equipped myself with a large gallbladder, as if I had foreseen a world in which effusions of bile were more expedient than those of a more sanguine variety.

Meanwhile, my longing for this stupid earth, upon which man is but a dog or a dog’s breakfast, grew more and more intense, so I turned my life upside down (Note 13), partially to reexamine my old mistress the h***n, partially to demonstrate that I could (for months on end) stand on my head, partially as an introduction to this noble earthy world (a thing to which I still lent credence) entering salon society through the most civilized and significant of doors. As a matter of fact, those fetal damsels, who, from a lack of worldliness, would turn their own backs or h***ns on the world, have already soaked up quite enough vulgarity from their wet nurses, the feminine doorwardens of life (portières). 

I did, of course, what I could; a new world, the destination, like Americus Vespucius, of my journey from the netherworld, gleamed and enticed me greatly. —As I said, I could count on progress, and at least assume that I would become something like the Heidelberger Tun (Note 14) or Maria Gloriosa (Note 15) in miniature, a reigning light for All Souls by day and a living Milky Way by night. —Moreover, a solitary fetus, having no other company but its own, will likely find the time overlong. Certainly twins, triplets, and quadruplets, who take up residence much like a club or casino regular, know nothing of this life. But a monarchical fetus, by hereditary right, resides in the uterus for three quarters of the year, all without his cavaliers and ladies of honor, and so develops a powerful thirst for court life, springing from his first boredom on such forced marches that he is quite often half-dead, having arrived (like every fetus) breathless and useless.

We need not be too hasty in our description; no levée, no entry at court is as important as that into a world where court and forecourt alike reside. So I would prefer to take one hundred steps back, detaining myself and the reader in the uterus, until we have gone through the fetus’s simpleminded notions of his future.

As I said, I had other hopes, namely for the best of earthly life. And why not? —A fetus such as myself or the reader—living in the single healthy tropical climate, with no change in season or time of day—nourished by his environs like a village beggar—taking part in everything his lady sovereign enjoys—embraced by love in the truest sense of the word, health and wealth attached to that of a stranger’s—free of worry as to his nourishment, other than becoming too fat, since the fetus resides in an edible bird’s nest and devours it by necessity, so that the subsequent christening feast wouldn’t equal a last meal before the gallows— — —a fetus, undergoing this prosperous prespringtide of life, having already arrived at a most careless and fiery age (because fifteen years later, of course, calm reason reigns) is certainly not one to dream of the earthly tumult in his future. But he goes completely mad and, turned upside down, takes the empty earthly second-fiddle for heaven, wishing to glimpse something of his spiritual development.  Already gifted with senses nine months before, he concludes he has all the sense he needs for the future 180 months. What love does he not hope for when he is in close communion with so many thousands of souls, bound to them by a more spiritual bond than the present umbilical cord? What does he not hope for in knowledge, learning so much from sermons and seminars, from muses, museums and mosaics, compared to his present little dark Delphic hole? Yea, such a stupid fetus (I do not conceal the youthful indiscretion of the womb) deduces that he, when even as a weak punctum saliens (jumping-off point) he has his trillion-times-stronger mother in his power, and outside more towering than she, in truth a springboard for manhood, pulling along ships of the line as a stout mast. — —

Well, if I become a mast or not, I will be measured when I appear! And then, finally, I did appear. In a word, once I felt my weightiness, namely that of seven pounds, I began to apply myself in earnest—put on a wig, putting myself a hair above the rest, so that I, half-hairbrained by nature, would not emerge into this world as bald as I would become in the future—mustered myself for a campaign of world domination—in short, I pulled the hair-trigger on the twenty-one-gun salute of my being…

Heaven and hell! I came into this world! And into the present one here!

The devil take it! A young Vierneissel was given to my parents!

I uttered about thirty or forty sailor’s curses in a row (these represent my terrible screams, I being ignorant of terrestrial vernacular at the time) as preface and letter of introduction to this beautiful lazarette,  from which I had been quarantined for so long and with such high hopes;—afterwards I yawned (like every born fetus) for a terribly long time at life on earth; I occasionally continue this yawning in wider, more refined circles, so that I might remain an open book to bookworms and speak my mind in silence. 

“So you are the adults?” (That's roughly what my questioning mind desired to say) —“and after nine honey months, am I to see myself exposed to this purgatory land and then, like a welp, immediately drowned in a completely fetal-foreign element, which you name desire? —The mother is unburdened, of course, but how should a little Vierneissel be so roughly diapered and disembarked, and like Jonas thrown into the sea of sensation to save the ship?” —Without further ado, without a savored bite or drop from this world of boobery, I shut by instinct both eyes and mouth, for suicide perhaps, to seize a future paradise, or for sleep, to seize through dream what was lost. I went damn wild; it was unthinkable—especially since I couldn’t think then anyway—that I, as a Wunderfetus right from the start, should be anything less than the Lübeck child prodigy, baptized Christian Heinecken (Note 16), who knew more of the Bible by heart in his first year than other people trespass or forget in their last. They later prised open my mouth, so to feed me the double-cup of life (as it is both grail and nightcap)—from the medicine bottle, our first as well as our last spoonful. 

With a little purgative and laxative, I raised a first toast to my own health and long life. 

A few days later I was given another promotion, baptized Vierneissel, and made shrieking disputations in a cold old church.

— —But I would be lacking wit if I continued on like this, namely not otherwise, since all who read this are themselves alive and have survived and continue doing so every born hour. Everyone knows for themselves that my hothouse existence in the uterus, like the rapid rising of a weather-glass, meant only changeable and inclement weather. —Out of discarded fetal footwear man slips into his kidskin boots. —And instead of upper limbs, it was the lower ones which grew from ground (following the anatomists and their dissections) up until the twenty-first year.

The interior of the head did not swell significantly either; one has years to conquer the sciences, obstetrics for example, which can later be reviewed and refreshed in an hour, should the need arise. —Of moral development, I am fairly ashamed even to speak, for on the crooked tree of man there is more than one slinking serpent, which through pain and gain I could straighten just as well as a dog’s tail, were I to yank it up and down. What fetus has not been a nine month’s saint, having professed and taken the veil in the uterine monastery? Has any reader of mine, at such an early apostolic age, committed adultery, bigamy, or burglary, have they slandered, slaughtered, or squandered? As he steps from the cloister into the open air does not the pure bright silver tarnish into black, as it does in Amsterdam? —The strongest, most painful bars of iron altar-rails, galley-chains, and foot-blocks scarcely restrain us now, when we get into running and frolicking, and are but a feeble coast-guard of an innocence which a lone uterus so easily guards? What immense barricades must not be erected monthly from sermon sheaves, Kantian curbstones, and Seileristic (Note 17) bible societies, Latin actis sanctorum (Note 18), partially as a parasol, partially as a hearth grate against the flames of hell, so that we devil flies do not buzz ever nearer, until we fall in with scorched wings? —Rabelais had his young Pantagruel invent and demonstrate cinquante-deux manières de se torcher le cul (Note 19); a significant number; but what multitude of spiritual manners or particular methods for conversion had to be invented, what multitude of pastoral letters—of pastoral indulgences—of confessional vouchers—of half-price vouchers for sermon books are necessary to redeem a grown man of five feet, are necessary to cleanse his portable and changeable Augean stables?

It is only in recent times that this unfortunate double life, which we lead concurrently for heaven (out of fear of hell) and for hell (out of preference for sensual heaven) has been made somewhat less sour by poetry and philosophy so-called. With heaven and earth more gently separated, better blended into one another, and above all, all earthly lust and sin imparted with a heavenly veneer of strength, character, fullness of life, poetry and the like, so that the difference, and consequently the sacrifice and anxiety, is diminished, it almost matters not what one does, for everything is done in twain. That double-hare (Note 20) caught in Geutschen's garden near Ulm—it was later placed in the royal-cabinet at Chantilly by Count Hanau—that freak of nature furnishes object proof of my thesis. Both hares had grown with their backs fused together, so that one perforce held head and limbs upward toward the heavens, as the other, on which he lay, hopped and browsed about the fields, then vice-versa, each exchanging their position in turn; for when one hare had had enough of hopping and browsing, he turned his four feet skyward, so his analogue, a March hare, could also march and spring about the earth. Such a double-hare (I will not say more without illustrations) is now very much the current-man of education; he always holds one set of eyes and ears upward, so he can hearken to heaven, while their counterparts cast about earthward and are content. 

Let us return, once again, to the womb; in spite of this beautiful resemblance to the Ulm monstrosity, down here one is not entirely free from a decisive wretchedness, which no legitimate saint likes to see or make a habit of. Our hare walking the earth below, like the giant Antaeus, gathers infernal powers against the other airborne hare and Hercules, overshooting his mark as a foreshot of sins of all kinds. But where lies the fault? Merely the rash transfer of fetal residence from the uterus to the earth; the transfer of imperial residence from Rome to Constantinople produced a strikingly similar consequence, viz. the decline of Rome (the seat of the Holy Father) and its dominion. 

I now vividly imagine the astonishment I caused in the world by dedicating myself to obstetrics and its auxiliary sciences, which together midwifed a kind of self-help science. But the world should get behind everything here. The first youthful or fetal impressions stick; I wanted to do for the good world- and uterine-citizens, and subsequently the fallen earth- and city-citizens, what no one had done for me. “For why,” I asked no one but myself, “should such an innocent being, insofar as the universe is actually the city of God (civitas dei, according to Augustine) and our earth but the Parisian rue des mauvais garçons—des mauvaises paroles—du pet-au-diable—de la cochonnerie (Note 21)—or the Viennese Hundsfott-Gäßchen (Note 22), why should a poor, unknown, unnamed devil of a fetus first take a detour through such a kennel-run as the Hundsgasse (Note 23) to the wonderful Rue de Rousseau (Note 24), Rue de deux anges, Rue de la loi (Note 25), to Friedrichstrasse (Note 26), to the Piazza San Marco (Note 27)? Can he not help himself?”

As an obstetrician, I could at least occasionally help and cite the facts of life. 

For the crucial question here is whether any fetus of understanding, having made the acquaintance of the even worst obstetrician, ever showed discontent at being delivered by good forceps—by hook or by crook, by Beers, by Smell, by Saxtorph (Note 28) —lifted as if by lever and vaulting-pole from the good, warm world, above our damp, cold world, over in a minute into the best one, which we, as Canaan and fatherland, have been floating toward for eighty years in our customary cork or silver fleets. 

Nevertheless, the most meritorious work is not generally performed; since for the obstetrician, wishing to midwife rebirth as well as birth, the best tools are well in hand and free, while in England and Germany only inferior tools are given to midwives as mothers of long earthly sorrows. The upstanding accoucheur (no overstepping stepfather) holds his forceps (by hook or by crook) and lays them down, like the Parisian Savoyard boy covering a coat-length of alleyway (Note 29), so that a pedestrian or equestrian fetus can easily cross the puddle of earthly life into the rue-de-Jean-Jacques or Voltaire’s Quarter into the New Jerusalem. And so a mere pair of tongs admits more souls and maidenly heads to heaven than the keys of St. Peter. If nevertheless fork and tongs prove insufficient at times, then the midwife of rebirth has with him also his scalpel or serving knife of heaven, with which he carves up a higher inheritance, through a local diminishment of issue, thereby increasing the heavenly endowment. Here, precisely on this mesturological divide, at the crossroads of two worlds, the obstetrician must show whether his artistic mettle is a dissipative lightning rod for local thunderstorms and whether he has the synthesis and assimilation of birth- and death-rolls in his power, or whether he, pitifully enough, only angles for a baptism and subsequent christening (albeit with a borrowed name); as though it were not enough for a being to exist, and not proper for it to remain anonymous, like a benefactor or like a passing prince. More than one convert to heathenism boasts of converted Christian souls, who for a future salvaged salvation will award him their sportive, feminine, or philistine favors; —I, weak Walter Vierneissel, along with a hundred French accoucheurs, yea, with even more grievance nursing nurses—I expect similar gratitude for good works done; here is no Pharaoh or Herod, both of whom arrived somewhat late to rescue infants with rebirth; —here is no present King of England (Note 30), who in his insanity could not sign a death sentence, so that the greatest offenders remained alive and in chains, until he finally came to his senses and a slate of rope-ready candidates came to the gallows; but here we are speaking of obstetricians, whom a British king only resembles when he regains his sanity and thereby the right to undersign small executions, yea, as well the greater ones of war, to cosign as a comrade-in-arms for the full holy grave of mankind. In a single word: good obstetricians spare the still immaculate fetus the local checkpoints and Tentamen and Examen Rigorosum (Note 31) of life completely, and immediately place it in its right highest post, which can hardly be any different than the second world to come. For the accoucheurs see this as an improved edition of the first, much like how the short Königsberger sausages are exalted and increased to a length of 536 cubits (Note 32) and 434 pounds, thirty-three whole pigs going into the making of the sausage in 1538. So they give the fetus, full of uterine ideals, the best world at birth, instead of our desperate one, just as other Germans read Wieland’s Golden Mirror (Note 33) or a Lichtenberg (Note 34) paperback immediately, in loose French translation or transfiguration, without having looked at the raw German archetype beforehand…

I conclude this essay and, I hope, my life as well, as a true, mortal, lifelong sinner. Must I not, if I want to live as a righteous man, lend my hand to many a future thief and his mistress, so that they are born and then born again as heavenly tadpoles of transfigured fetuses; luckily, night after night, like smokers at a club with their Dutch pipes, I break off another miasmatic piece of my life; if this continues (as is to be hoped for) then I will finally revert completely from pipe stem to pipe head (just as I was no more than a head, when an embryo); and so I now approach my own rebirth with faster steps than usual, daily traveling through the years toward just such an embryonic purpose, from which a second fetus and uterus can be no more than a coffin-length.  But then the devil would have to play his game all over again, were I to become nothing but a human being and obstetrician by name

Walter Vierneissel

accoucheur loci

***

1 As is well known, we differ from the apes in such a fashion, according to the naturalists, when viewed from behind. 

2 Jumping-off point. —Trans.

3 A pious body. —Trans.

4 Argus Panoptes was a giant in Greek mythology, guardian to heifer-nymph Io. His epithet means “many eyes”, which numbered up to a hundred in some accounts. —Trans.

5 Og was an Amorite king of Bashan, defeated and slain by the armies of Moses at the Battle of Edrei. According to the books of Deuteronomy and Numbers, he was the last of Rephaites, a race of giants. —Trans. 

6 Another giant, protagonist of Voltaire’s 1752 proto science-fiction novella of the same name. An inhabitant of a planet orbiting the star Sirius, Micromegas journeys to Earth and makes various satirical observations on human nature. —Trans.

7 A reference to “Ideals”, a poem by Friedrich Schiller published in 1796. It later served as inspiration for a symphonic poem by Franz Liszt, composed for the unveiling of the Goethe and Schiller Monument in Weimar in 1857. —Trans.

8 A teller of bad fortune. —Trans. 

9 On the spine of the fetus, the tailbone (os coccyges) because of a relative lack of flesh, takes the form of small tail.

10 In Book IV of the Aeneid, Dido, Queen of Carthage, and the hero Aeneas go out hunting one day. The goddess Juno sends a thunderstorm, and the two take shelter in a cave, where they make love. —Trans. 

11 Johann Christian Rosenmüller (1771–1820) was an anatomist at the University of Jena. By studying remains found in the cave at Muggendorf—which was subsequently named after him—Rosenmüller identified and described a species of prehistoric cave bear, Ursus spelaeus, an important find in the early history of paleontology. —Trans. 

12 A cave in in the Province of Albacete, Spain, containing an underground lagoon, where Don Quixote makes a descent in Book II of Cervantes’s novel. –Trans. 

13 It is well known that the fetus stands on its head in the last few months before birth.

14 An extremely large wine vat, housed in Heidelberg Castle. It has been a popular tourist site for centuries. There have been four gigantic vats constructed at the site, the latest dating from 1751. —Trans. 

15 The world’s largest free-swinging bell, housed in Erfurt Cathedral and cast in 1497. It weighs approximately thirteen tons and is tuned to the note of E. —Trans. 

16 Christian Heinrich Heinecken (1721–1725), known as “the infant scholar of Lübeck”, was a child prodigy who lived to the age of four. He was reported to have read the Pentateuch by the age of one and the entire Old and New Testaments in Latin by the age of three.

17 Georg Friedrich Seiler (1733–1807) was a German theologian and schoolmaster, who in 1779 founded a Bible society at the University of Erlangen. —Trans. 

18 “Acts of the saints”, possibly a reference to an enormous, 68-folio encyclopedic hagiography of the same name, compiled by the Jesuits in the 17th and 18th centuries. —Trans. 

19 “Fifty-two ways to wipe your ass”, a quote from the novel Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais. —Trans.

20 Dialogues from Natural Philosophy. The Mammals, Vol. I (1792).

21 “The street of bad boys—of bad words—of fart-at-the-devil—of filth”, this being a list of nicknames for various slums and red-light districts in Paris. —Trans. 

22 “Alley of the hound’s paw”, slang for a woman’s genitals, a term notably used by Mozart in one of his ribald letters. —Trans.

23 “Alley of dog,” is the name of small alleyway in Salzburg, close to the Nonnburg Abbey. It is the site of Romanesque statue of a lion, once thought to be that of a dog. The phrase “Nonnberger Hund” was slang for a bad person, possibly a reference to the city executioner, who resided on that street.  —Trans. 

24 A street in the 1st arrondissement of Paris, named after the Swiss philosopher and memoirist in 1791. —Trans. 

25 “Street of Two Angels” and “Street of the Law”, demolished in 19th century modernization projects and renamed Rue de Richelieu, after the 17th century cardinal statesman, respectively. —Trans. 

26 A major street running through central Berlin, famous for its shops and cultural sites. —Trans.

27 The principal public square in Venice, fronting Saint Mark’s Basilica, “the drawing-room of Europe” as Napoleon called it. –—Trans. 

28 Various manufacturers of medical instruments. —Trans. 

29 An obscure reference in the specifics, but alluding to the common presence of young migrants from the region of Savoy on the streets of Paris at that time, as well as general filthiness of city at the time. —Trans.

30 George III (1738–1820) suffered periodic bouts of mental illness throughout his life, which became permanent in his last decade. —Trans. 

31 The Tentamen Medicum and Examen Rigorosum were a series of written and oral examinations in Latin performed by medical students in the Prussian university system. —Trans.

32 From Wagenseil's Lessons for a Prince, which Lichtenberg also cited. 

33 A reference to The Golden Mirror or the Kings of Scheschian by Christoph Martin Wieland, a long didactic novel composed of various orientalist tales. It was very popular during Jean Paul’s lifetime. —Trans. 

34 A reference to the physicist and satirical writer Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) an important figure in the German Enlightenment and early influence on Jean Paul.  —Trans. 

***

Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825), was a German essayist and writer of fiction. A popular but divisive figure in his lifetime, he achieved prominence through a hyper-digressive style and characteristic mixture of idyllic sentimentality and coarse satire. Jean Paul fell into relative obscurity during the late 19th century, but not before influencing a wide variety of writers and philosophers, among them Thomas Carlyle, Herman Melville, and Friedrich Nietszche. His novel Biographical Recreations from the Skull of a Giantess and the collection Two Stories are forthcoming through Empyrean Editions.

Matthew Spencer is a writer and translator based out of the Pacific Northwest region of the United States of America. His latest full-length translation, Anecdotes by Heinrich von Kleist, is available through Sublunary Editions. He runs the newsletter and publishing organ Paradise Almanac.