Herman Hesse 
Siddhartha – translated into English 
A short novel

Who is Siddhartha?


He is one who seeks, and seeks above all to live his whole life. He goes from experience to experience, from mysticism to sensuality, from philosophical meditation to business life, and he does not stop with any master, he does not consider any acquisition definitive, because what is to be sought is the whole, the mysterious whole that is clothed in a thousand changing faces.


And in the end, that all, the wheel of appearances, will flow back behind Siddhartha’s perfect smile, which repeats the ‘constant, tranquil, fine, impenetrable, perhaps benign, perhaps mocking, wise, multi-wrinkled smile of Gotama, the Buddha, as he himself had seen it hundreds of times with veneration’. Siddhartha is undoubtedly Hesse’s most universally known work.


This short novel with an Indian ambience, first published in 1922, has in fact had a resounding fortune in recent years. First in America, then in all parts of the world, young people have rediscovered it as their own text, where they found not only a great modern writer but a subtle and delicate essay, capable of giving, through this fictional parable, a teaching on life that his readers evidently did not encounter elsewhere.