A Note on the Translation

This is a complete translation of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. Eine indische Dichtung, made directly from the German. No earlier English version was used as its basis. The source is a public-domain transcription of the first edition, published by S. Fischer in Berlin in 1922.

Hesse called the book a Dichtung, the German word for a work of imaginative literature, and a word that keeps something of “poetry” in it. He did not call it a novel or a tale. We keep his claim in the subtitle, An Indian Poem, although the poem is written in prose: a prose of long, chanting sentences, of words and phrases that return like a refrain. Those returns are the music of the book, so they have been kept, and a phrase that comes back is rendered the same way each time it comes back. Where Hesse’s sentence is long, ours is long.

The book has two parts, each with Hesse’s dedication, and twelve chapters with his titles. Each of the 524 paragraphs of the original appears here as one paragraph, including the six lines of the verses Siddhartha makes for Kamala.

A few words needed a decision. The priest is a Brahmin, and the absolute is Brahman, as English can tell them apart. Gotama is called by his followers the Exalted One (der Erhabene) and the Perfected One (der Vollendete). The wandering ascetics keep their name, Samanas. Hesse coined Kindermenschen for the people of the world who live by their wishes and cares; we have written the child people, which is as odd in English as the coinage is in German, rather than “childlike people,” which would explain it away. Sansara and Nirwana appear in their English forms, Samsara and Nirvana.

In chapter VII, “Samsara,” the transcription repeats a fragment of one sentence inside the sentence before it; we have restored the passage by its sense. The Korean edition of this book in our series made the same restoration.

Names keep their Indian form as Hesse wrote them (Gotama, Govinda, Kamaswami, Vasudeva). Spelling and punctuation are American. There are no translator’s notes.