If your father’s thankful apprentice can do you a service – name it – it would be my recompense.’ (p.224)īut, as mentioned, it is this low-key but persistent ‘medieval’ style which gives the book its distinctive flavour and tone. I wanted to give you greeting – you, and the Master. ‘Mistress Lisbeth,’ he said, in a friendly voice. Narziss and Goldmund is set in the Middle Ages and both narrative and dialogue are couched in an unobtrusive but persistent cod-medieval style which might irritate some modern readers. By contrast, Narziss and Goldmund maintains a calm, lyrical and mellifluous sonority throughout, leading some critics to call it Hesse’s ‘most lyrical’ novel. Narziss and Goldmund is longer than its predecessor novel, Steppenwolf (300 pages in the Penguin edition compared to Steppenwolf’s 250 pages). And it’s far more integrated and coherent than Steppenwolf, which is built up from a number of different texts, echoing the fragmented nature of the protagonist’s divided mind. Narcissus and Gold Mouth might begin to sound too much like a fairy tale. Goldmund translates literally as ‘gold mouth’, though you can see why this wouldn’t work so well as a title. ‘Narziss’ is a direct transliteration of the name in original German title, Narziß und Goldmund, but the word also translates as Narcissus, which is why some modern editions are titled Narcissus and Goldmund. He died in 1962, shortly after his eighty-fifth birthday.He drew himself, as a wanderer, a lover, a fugitive, with reaping death hard at his heels… Hesse won many literary awards, including the Nobel Prize in 1946.

His humanity, his searching philosophy developed further in such novels as Siddhartha (1922), Der Steppenwolf (1927), Narziss and Goldmund (1930) and Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game, 1943), while his poems and critical writings won him a leading place among contemporary thinkers. He was denounced in Germany and settled permanently in Switzerland, where he established himself as one of the greatest literary figures in the German-speaking world. After a visit to India in 1911 he moved to Switzerland and worked for the Red Cross during the First World War. After a first volume of verse (1899), Hesse established his reputation with a series of lyrical romantic novels- Peter Camenzind (1904), Unterm Rad (The Prodigy, 1906), Gertrud (1910) and the short story, Knulp (1915). He spent a short period studying at a seminary in Germany but soon left to work as a bookseller in Switzerland. As a child, he lived for a time in Basle. HERMANN HESSE was born in Calw, Germany, in 1877.

Narziss en Goldmund by Hermann Hesse