The Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, translated by Kurt Beals

The Steppenwolf
By Hermann Hesse
Translated by Kurt Beals
WW Norton 2023

Once upon a time, in the ratty, bustling, pre-Bank of America days of Harvard Square, a wonderfully reserved old Harvard emeritus and former Bonn bookseller used to spend some of his afternoons holding down a public chessboard against all comers. These were invariably college undergraduates, and one of these unfortunates, prior to his defenestration, set his battered paperback on the side of the board. That crusty emeritus spotted the title   – Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse – snatched it up and began reading. He kept the game going – the defenestration proceeded apace – but, in the kind of  fillip of humiliation in which senior academics once specialized, he also kept turning the pages. 

In due course, the board was a bomb site, the undergraduate was facing what would likely be the only guaranteed mating of his life, and the old emeritus was so upset that his self-possession was slipping just a bit. 

“This,” he sputtered, “what is this?”

“It’s a great novel,” said the undergraduate, still studying the board in stubborn hope. “It, like, totally changed my life.”

“This is not Hesse!” 

“Why not?” asked the undergraduate, momentarily distracted from his doom. “Is the translation, like, wrong?”

“It’s worse than wrong,” growled the outraged old bookseller, slapping the book down and extinguishing the game with a ruthless crack of his queen. “It’s boring.” 

An observer would have found it difficult to decide which seemed to crush that undergraduate more, the fact that he was checkmated by somebody who wasn’t even paying attention, or the fact that an indisputable authority had deemed his life-changing book a fraud. He picked up his copy of Steppenwolf and slinked off, doubtless to a career at Bear Stearns. 

That was the old Basil Creighton translation of Hesses’ 1927 classic Der Steppenwolf, in a paperback edition that made a tidy pile of money for Bantam many years ago, and although that translation has been refined and redecorated and recycled over the years, its limitations have not only persisted by very likely spread virally to later translations. 

The latest of these, The Steppenwolf, smartly issued by WW Norton, Kurt Beals frankly addresses this translation virology even as he provides a fire break against it. His translation is so assuredly, handily superior to all its predecessors that it feels more like a starting point than an extension of tradition. 

True, his Introduction at first gives heart palpitations of stupidity – he opens by mentioning that “Steppenwolf” was the name of the rock band who had a hit single in 1968, then going on to mention that none of the band’s members had ever heard of the book (their producer suggested the band’s name) and that there’s no way to know what Hesse would have thought of the song, since he died five years before it hit the charts … in other words, editorial throat-clearing of the worst, most time-wasting sort. But he gets it out of his system early on and proceeds to write fascinatingly about the “incremental, asymptotic approximation of the impossible ideal of a single ‘correct’ translation.” He’s generous with the Creighton translation, its various revisions over the years, and additional versions by David Horrocks and Thomas Wayne, but he nonetheless tentatively proposes that he himself has produced something that “comes closer than any previous translation to an accurate rendering of the German text.” 

He has, and he’s managed it not only by bearing down with extreme geekish precision on certain words and phrases but also by taking the book’s racist or sexist bit squarely as he finds them, without the bowdlerization of earlier versions and without the scorched-earth moral censorship that is currently ascendant in the 21st century. “These passages are unpleasant to read, and unpleasant to translate,” he admits simply, “but they tell us something important about Hesse and the period and culture in which he lived and wrote.” 

By thus sticking so close to the original, Beals has, paradoxically, given readers a newer-feeling Hesset than they’ve ever encountered in English. In his strange journey around an ever-changing and seemingly half-imaginary city, the novel’s main character, The Steppenwolf, Harry Haller (a kind of funhouse-mirror stand-in for Hesse himself; as Beals notes, most of the characters in the book are funhouse-mirror stand-ins for Hesse himself – Harry Haller may very well be alone in his garrett) meets a handful of surreal characters. A stranger on the street hands him a small pamphlet that seems to describe his life. A mysterious woman named Hermine talks to him about urgent metaphysics in headlong tones Beals captures perfectly:

“Fame really only exists for the sake of education, it’s something that schoolteachers care about, It isn’t fame, oh no! But what I call eternity. Pious people call it the Kingdom of God. I always tell myself: we people – the more demanding ones, with our longings, with our one dimension too many – none of us would be able to live at all if there weren't some other air to breathe beyond the air of this world, if there weren’t something beyond time – eternity, and that is the realm of the authentic. It includes the music of Mozart and the poems of your great poets, it includes the saints who performed miracles, who died martyrs’ deaths and set a great example for mankind. But eternity also includes the image of every authentic deed, the power of every authentic feeling, even if no one knows about it and sees it and writes it down and preserves it for posterity. In eternity there is no posterity, we are all contemporaries.”

These ardent passages of Germanic twaddle are one of the two qualities that have always made The Steppenwolf a cult classic among a younger demographic (Hesse himself noticed this and was, typically, bemused by it). The other quality increases in frequency and strength as the novel progresses and Haller’s slim cupboard of certainties is steadily emptied out: Hesse’s prose unspools in long, looping sentences of glorious interminability. Since English isn’t nearly as suited for this kind of thing as German, previous translators have tended to curtail it, but Beals exults in such passages:

There were wild, wonderfully provocative posters on all the walls, with giant letters that blazed like torches, calling on the nation to finally stand up for the people, against the machines, to finally but an end to the fat, well-dressed, fragrantly perfumed rich people who used their machines to squeeze the last ounce of fat out of everyone else – to kill those rich people along with their big, wheezing, ominously growling, diabolically purring automobiles, to finally set fire to the factories and clear out the desecrated earth and depopulate it a bit so that grass could grow again, so that the dusty cement world could once again give way to something like forest, meadow, heath, brook, and moor.

In this painstakingly reckless rendition, The Steppenwolf reveals the odd, ungainly imaginative power that made it every bit the reading sensation its predecessor Siddhartha had been, a century ago. If Hermann Hesse is to find a new generation of readers, it will be through translations just like this one.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.