Zettel's Dream
His theory of etyms is developed in his magnum opus, Zettels Traum, in which an elderly writer comments on Edgar Allan Poe's works in a stream of consciousness, while discussing a Poe translation with a couple of translators and flirting with their teenage daughter. Schmidt also accomplished a translation of Edgar Allan Poe's works himself (1966–73, together with Hans Wollschläger). Some critics even dismissed Zettel's Traum as non-art, or sheer nonsense, and Schmidt himself as a "psychopath." but Schmidt's reputation as esoteric, and that of his work as non-art, has faded and he is now seen as an important, if highly eccentric, German writer of the 20th century.
Read more about this topic: Arno Schmidt
Famous quotes containing the word dream:
“A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is
not waking thoughts although it is written and thought
with waking thoughts. But really a novel goes as
dreams go in sleeping at night and some dreams are like
anything and some dreams are like something and some
dreams change and some dreams are quiet and some dreams
are not. And some dreams are just what any one would
do only a little different always just a little
different and that is what a novel is.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)