You are drowned in dazzling splendour everything around you appears illuminated and begirt with beaming rainbow hues: in the sheen everything seems to quiver and waver and clang and drone. If you have had such dreams, you will understand the Student Anselmus's woe and will feel it keenly enough but if you have not, then your flying imagination, for the sake of Anselmus and me, will have to be obliging enough to enclose itself for a few moments in the crystal. I am probably right in doubting, gracious reader, that you were ever sealed up in a glass bottle, or even that you have ever been oppressed with such sorcery in your most vivid dreams. Magic and love combine and love becomes magical. The Golden Pot is one of the best surreal tales ever written. And as he looked, and still looked, full of warm desire, into those kind eyes, the crystal bells sounded louder in harmonious accord, and the glittering emeralds fell down and encircled him, flickering round him in a thousand sparkles and sporting in resplendent threads of gold. Through all his limbs there went a shock like electricity he quivered in his inmost heart: he kept gazing up, and a pair of glorious dark-blue eyes were looking at him with unspeakable longing and an unknown feeling of highest blessedness and deepest sorrow nearly rent his heart asunder. Hoffmann wrote surrealistic stories long before the term surrealism was coined.Īnselmus observed that one snake held out its little head to him.

Ritchie Robertson's detailed introduction places the stories in their intellectual and historical context and explores their compelling narrative complexities.E.T.A. They include The Golden Pot, recognized as Hoffmann's masterpiece by himself and posterity its spine-chilling companion tale, The Sandman, which Offenbach drew on for his opera Tales of Hoffmann, and which Freud examines in his essay `The Uncanny' two longer and more elaborate fantasies, set respectively in Germany and Italy and the late story, My Cousin's Corner Window, which shows the powers of the imagination being applied to everyday urban life, and marks a transition in European literature generally from Romanticism to Realism. The humour of these tales is a result of the incongruity of supernatural beings at large in an ostentatiously everyday world. This selection, while stressing the variety of his work, puts in the foreground those tales in which the real and the supernatural are brought into contact and conflict. GOLDEN POT AND OTHER TALES OWC:PB,Hoffmann is among the greatest and most popular of the German Romantics.

The golden pot hoffmann