The Country Preacher - Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz

The Country Preacher by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, translated by Douglas Robertson / ISBN 9781955190787 / small 86-page paperback from Sublunary Editions

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In this 1777 novella are related the life and the career of the pastor Johannes Mannheim as pieced together by his adult son from memories and documents after the father’s death. Through his Sunday sermons and his social influence, Mannheim institutes a number of agrarian and social reforms among his parishioners, ushering in a period of prosperity for his village and his family. Written and published shortly after Lenz was ordered to leave the Weimar court, here is an ambivalent idyll of the Sturm und Drang period, a work that both celebrates and challenges the idea of Enlightenment agency. This new translation of Lenz’s novella is by Douglas Robertson, who has previously translated works by Thomas Bernhard, Ludwig Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

The German-language writer Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (Jan. 23, 1751–1792) was one of eight children born to a Lutheran pastor and a pastor’s daughter. Lenz passed his childhood and adolescence in Sesswegen, Livonia before going to Königsberg, Prussia to study theology, where he attended the lectures of Immanuel Kant. His first substantial work, the verse epic Die Landplagen [The Scourges], was published in 1769. In In 1774 several of Lenz’s plays were anonymously published, including Der Hofmeister [The Tutor] and Der neue Menoza [The New Menoza]. In 1776 Lenz went to Weimar, hoping to find employment at court, but was ordered to leave, probably for writing an offensive pasquinade about the Duchess. In 1777 he stayed for several months with Goethe’s brother-in-law Johann Georg Schlosser, during which time he wrote Der Landprediger [The Country Preacher], serialized later the same year. In the winter of 1777–78 Lenz suffered a mental health crisis, an account of which was recorded by the village pastor Jean-Frédéric Oberlin, and which was later freely adapted by Georg Büchner as a source for the fictional reconstruction of Lenz's experience during his stay. In the years 1779–81 Lenz traveled several times between Livonia and Saint Petersburg trying to find employment as a school principal or at the Russian court. In 1781 he went to Moscow, where he found employment in a boarding school for children of the nobility. He later translated Sergei Ivanovich Plescheev’s Survey of the Russian Empire into German and produced a range of essays and other literary works, many of them fragmentary. He died in Moscow of unknown causes at the age of forty-one.