Waldemar Bonsels: An Indian Journey
Apr. 27th, 2008 08:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustI like old travel books; they describe places that are unattainably exotic not because they are geographically remote but because they are in the past. So this charity shop find had to be worth a second look: besides, I'd been reading about the Indian journeys of my f-list. I took it off the shelf - and once I saw the endpapers, I had to have it:
As a map to the journey described in the book this is very little help; but it's so pretty. And the artist has added the attribution "done by Harry Brown, who has read all about it". He has also provided decorative chapter headings throughout the book (some of which you can see by going to Amazon.com and looking inside the book, of which I am amazed to find there is a current edition). It's not easy to Google someone with a name like Harry Brown, and I couldn't find anything about him except references to this book.
Waldemar Bonsels, on the other hand, is best known as the author of the children's book Maja the Bee - which appears to be as much a children's book as An Indian Journey is a travel book, that is, there is a story in there, but it is outweighed by a variety of mystical meditations. An Indian Journey was published in the US in 1928, and in the UK the following year; but the original German edition was published in 1916 (and seems to describe a journey made some years earlier, though since Bonsels was born in 1880, he was not as elderly when he wrote the book as he suggests). No translator is credited, and I wonder whether the translation is the work of the author.
The narrative opens with no preamble: "When I arrived at Cannanore in the blessed province of Malabar, the Hindu Rameni led me in front of his house which he wished me to rent from him during my stay there." Bonsels does not explain what he is doing in India, or what has brought him to Malabar. But he takes the house, which has stood empty and untended for years, and settles in, to the disgust of his servant.And so it continues: he watches the sun rise and set, he goes to the sea and watches the fishing boats; he buys a pet monkey, with which he has a long conversation, and discovers a yearning for the forest; he journeys into the forest, has various illuminations about life, and catches a fever of which he might have died, but did not.
And so on. Had he traveled to India purely in search of these mystical experiences? Had his journey some other purpose, which the book does not reveal? Not knowing, I felt adrift, never quite sure whether my companion was more entertaining or infuriating, or both by turns.
Two other things. The German text is available from Project Gutenberg (who claim it is "Not copyrighted in the United States." since Bonsels died in the 1950s, I don't know why). And my copy is inscibed: "Colonel M. Hartford Jones from L.G.B. 23.7.49" I wonder what the Colonel made of it?
As a map to the journey described in the book this is very little help; but it's so pretty. And the artist has added the attribution "done by Harry Brown, who has read all about it". He has also provided decorative chapter headings throughout the book (some of which you can see by going to Amazon.com and looking inside the book, of which I am amazed to find there is a current edition). It's not easy to Google someone with a name like Harry Brown, and I couldn't find anything about him except references to this book.
Waldemar Bonsels, on the other hand, is best known as the author of the children's book Maja the Bee - which appears to be as much a children's book as An Indian Journey is a travel book, that is, there is a story in there, but it is outweighed by a variety of mystical meditations. An Indian Journey was published in the US in 1928, and in the UK the following year; but the original German edition was published in 1916 (and seems to describe a journey made some years earlier, though since Bonsels was born in 1880, he was not as elderly when he wrote the book as he suggests). No translator is credited, and I wonder whether the translation is the work of the author.
The narrative opens with no preamble: "When I arrived at Cannanore in the blessed province of Malabar, the Hindu Rameni led me in front of his house which he wished me to rent from him during my stay there." Bonsels does not explain what he is doing in India, or what has brought him to Malabar. But he takes the house, which has stood empty and untended for years, and settles in, to the disgust of his servant.And so it continues: he watches the sun rise and set, he goes to the sea and watches the fishing boats; he buys a pet monkey, with which he has a long conversation, and discovers a yearning for the forest; he journeys into the forest, has various illuminations about life, and catches a fever of which he might have died, but did not.
And so on. Had he traveled to India purely in search of these mystical experiences? Had his journey some other purpose, which the book does not reveal? Not knowing, I felt adrift, never quite sure whether my companion was more entertaining or infuriating, or both by turns.
Two other things. The German text is available from Project Gutenberg (who claim it is "Not copyrighted in the United States." since Bonsels died in the 1950s, I don't know why). And my copy is inscibed: "Colonel M. Hartford Jones from L.G.B. 23.7.49" I wonder what the Colonel made of it?
