Hesse, Hermann.
The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse. Translated and with an introduction by Jack Zipes. New York NY: Bantam Books, 1995
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Every phenomenon on earth is symbolic,and each symbol is an open gate through which the soul, if it is ready, can enter into the inner part of the world, where you and I and day and night are all one.
Not surprisingly, I was totally glued to this volume of short fiction culled from Hesse's jottings, 1900-1933. Readers with an inward turn of mind
would probably enjoy at least some of the "tales." Actually somewhere in between the modern "short story" and what Jack Zipes calls "European and Oriental fairy tales," these stories adapt the "tropes and topoi" of the old traditions but end up showing us "the trauma, doubts, and dreams of the artist as a young man in Germany at the beginning of a tumultuous century." Translator Jack Zipes, who is a popular professor here (his office is downstairs from mine but we haven't met) supplies a tantalizingly short biography and reading that reminds me that there is definitely something in common between Yang Jiang, me, Hesse, Zipes, my teachers, and anyone that ever feels on the margins of society because of their own morbid concern with the inner workings of their own mind. Unable either to turn their brains off or to solve any of the many thorny issues they encounter, the turn to fairy tales and other traditional art forms is at least partly an escape mechanism.
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