Johann Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen 
The Continuation of Simplicissimus 

The Continuation is Grimmelshausen's 'pilgrim's progress', the concluding chapter in one of the greatest and most acclaimed German novels. It combines fantastic episodes with a realistic narrative style.
At the end of his original adventures his hero withdraws from the world to live as a hermit in the Black Forest. Now, after a vivid dream of the Devil and all his minions at work, he decides to become a pilgrim and visit the holy places, making his way, with various encounters, across Switzerland to Italy, where he takes passage on a ship to Egypt. Outside Cairo he is captured by Arab robbers who take him to the Red Sea, exhibiting him as a wild man from the desert. Rescued by European merchants, he embarks on a ship to return home via the Cape of Good Hope, but the ship is wrecked and, 50 years before Robinson Crusoe, he is marooned on a desert island.

Über den Autor

For many years an academic with a special interest in Austrian literature and culture, Mike Mitchell has been a freelance literary translator since 1995. He has published over eighty translations from German and French, including Gustav Meyrink’s five novels and The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy. His translation of Rosendorfer’s Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize after he had been shortlisted in previous years for his translations of Stephanie by Herbert Rosendorfer and The Golem by Gustav Meyrink. His translations have been shortlisted four times for The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize: Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen in 1999, The Other Side by Alfred Kubin in 2000, The Bells of Bruges by Georges Rodenbach in 2008 and The Lairds of Cromarty by Jean Pierre Ohl in 2013.