Translator's Note

Justinus Kerner (1786 to 1862), poet and district physician of Weinsberg in Württemberg, made these pictures by letting ink fall on paper and folding it, and wrote a verse to each. His preface is signed “Im Februar 57”, that is, February 1857, and in it he gives the growing weakness of his eyes as the reason the blots began to fall. The book was printed after his death by the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt in Stuttgart; the title page carries no date, and the year 1890 is that of the scanned copy’s catalogue record and of the German Wikipedia article on Kerner, which says his son Theobald published it.

This translation is made from the page images of that printing, the copy in the Getty Research Institute, scanned by the Internet Archive. The German was transcribed afresh from the images, not from the scan’s text layer. Projekt Gutenberg’s German text, which follows a different source (it spells Dinte where the 1890 printing has Tinte, and differs in a few words), was used only as a check on the transcription; every difference was settled from the 1890 page. The Heidelberg University Library has digitized another copy of the 1890 printing; it has not yet been compared. Kerner’s own manuscript, kept at the Schiller-Nationalmuseum in Marbach, has not been consulted.

The English keeps the book’s parts in their order: the title page, the frontispiece, Kerner’s preface on kleksography, the handwritten title of the Hades pictures, the opening poems, the Hades pictures, and the Hell pictures. Each picture stands where the book prints it, sometimes in the middle of a poem that runs over from one page to the next, and each is credited to the library whose copy it comes from. Every heading is given in English and then as Kerner printed it. The poems are translated line for line, without rhyme, keeping Kerner’s stanza breaks and the short rules printed between the poems. Where Kerner spaced out the letters of a word for emphasis, the English sets it in italics. His dashes are given as commas, colons or parentheses. The page numbers of the 1890 printing are not reproduced.

The text is translated without modern commentary. A few notes, marked with a dagger and a roman numeral and gathered at the end, explain a pun or place a name the reader could not otherwise place, and each says where its information comes from.