Dear Friends,
After many years in the making, I'm happy to announce the publication of A Shelter for Bells: From the Writings of Hans Jürgen von der Wense. Culled from more than four thousand pages in the original German, I collected passages from the writings of Hans Jürgen von der Wense and translated them with Kristofor Minta. The book is beautifully edited by Kirston Lightowler of Epidote Press and includes the following chapters: On Weather and Wandering, On Landscape and Place, On the Celestial, On the Hidden Properties of Things, On Knowing and Being, and On Writing and Language. Available to order now! A Shelter for Bells is the first book of Wense's writings published in English and brings together extracts from his diaries, letters, and manuscript pages.
Composer, translator, folklorist, wanderer, aphorist, encyclopedist, poet, and consummate mystagogue of the landscape Hans Jürgen von der Wense was born in Ortelsburg, East Prussia, on November 10, 1894. Wense writes that some of his earliest memories included lightning, shooting stars, nasturtiums, a fire in the stove, bad spots in an apple, eggshell in the mouth, the rattling of sabers when his father came home, and a song by Schumann beginning with a throng of dark notes, which sent him fleeing in fear to a place beneath the piano—a refuge and small sanctuary from where he would carefully study an atlas of the world.
One day before his seventy-second birthday, Wense died in a small attic apartment in the university town of Göttingen. He was nearly unknown to the literary and arts community, yet he left behind a magnificent legacy and would come to be considered one of the most eccentric, radical, and enigmatic literary figures of his generation. At the time of his death his apartment housed what could be described as a personal atlas—the charting of a life in letters, the mapping of a mind in an archive of numerous diaries and scrapbooks, hundreds of annotated survey maps and musical compositions, three thousand photographs, six thousand letters, and thirty thousand loose sheets of writings. These loose sheets contained his writings on natural history, mineralogy, astrology, astronomy, poetry, folklore, and music, to name but a few of the many subjects that formed the bedrock of his life and work.
A brilliant polymath, Wense planned to create the All-book from his extensive multidisciplinary research and writings. An encyclopedia arranged by keyword, it would collate his aphorisms, adaptations, and translations from more than one hundred languages, including those of the Middle East, Africa, Asia, South America, and Oceania. Wense considered and embraced everything—from a register of the items in the bedchamber of Alcibiades to a text fragment on singing crickets and a treatise on earwax.
Wense’s move to Kassel in 1932 marked the beginning of his life as an ecstatic wanderer and writer of the Wanderbuch. The move was precipitated by a life-changing event—his discovery of the Hessian and Westphalian highlands, a landscape for which he was to develop a deep and lasting love. The rest of his life would be dedicated to a comprehensive and profound survey of the landscape between the “poles” of Soest, Hildesheim, Eschwege, and Marburg. The Wanderbuch was to be a survey of this landscape in the greatest of detail—micro-territorial reappraisals of closest proximity.
