Butterflies: Reflections, Tales, and Verse
Description
This volume gathers the most alluring stories, recollections, contemplations and poems on butterflies by Herman Hesse.
"I have always had a connection with butterflies and other fleeting and ephemeral beauties, while I have never succeeded in maintaining permanent, committed and so-called solid relationships," writes Hermann Hesse in a letter from 1926. This preference, occasionally resembling an elective affinity, for "flowers and butterflies, that are of everlasting things, a fleeting allegory" – as he says in one of his poems, has left its mark on Hesse’s entire oeuvre.
Praise for Butterflies: Reflections, Tales, and Verse
A lovely small book...assembles Hesse’s lepidopteran “reflections, tales and verse,” including an extract from the novel “Demian.” Translated by Elisabeth Lauffer, the selections were chosen by the world’s foremost Hesse authority, Volker Michels, who also contributes an interpretive afterword, while the little book itself is further enhanced with dozens of Jakob Hubner’s 18th-century engravings of these flowerlike insects. If you celebrate Christmas in July, this will make an ideal stocking stuffer!
— Michael Dirda - The Washington Post
An exquisite tribute to … the natural world.
— Portland Book Review
A charming book for nature and literature lovers...leaving audiences feeling as lucky to encounter it as Hesse felt about meeting his winged subjects.
— Foreword Reviews
In these peaceful meditations, Nobel author Herman Hesse contemplates both the eternal and the ephemeral, the yin and yang of life.
— Wendy Williams, New York Times best-selling author of The Language of Butterflies
A
soulful century-old reflection.
— Maria Popova - The Marginalian
This volume on butterflies is a perfect
companion to the Hesse anthology on trees…[and] may give you an inkling of the
wonder you had as a child.
— Today’s American Catholic