A Note on the Translation

This is a complete translation of Hermann Hesse’s novel Unterm Rad, made directly from the German. No earlier English version was used as its basis. The source is a public-domain transcription of the S. Fischer edition, in which the transcriber corrected seven misprints; those corrections are kept.

The German title means “under the wheel.” The phrase occurs once in the book, when the ephorus of the seminary warns Hans not to let himself grow weary, “or you’ll end up beneath the wheel.” English readers have known the novel as Beneath the Wheel, and once as The Prodigy; we keep the first, because it keeps Hesse’s image, and we render the ephorus’s warning so that the title’s words return in it.

A few words carry the book and are rendered the same way throughout. Matt, the word of the ephorus’s warning and of the old song Hans hums to himself in chapter five, is always weary; Kopfweh, Hans’s companion from his schooldays on, is always headache. The Landexamen is the state examination, the competitive examination by which the boys of Württemberg entered the seminaries; the head of the seminary is the ephorus, and the head of the Latin school at home is the rector. The rooms of the seminary keep the names Hesse gives them: Hellas, Athens, Sparta, the Forum. Where the story turns on the German forms of address, Sie for a grown man and du among friends, the German word is kept in italics and its sense given in the sentence.

The narrator sometimes steps out of the story to comment in the present tense; those passages stay in the present tense. Hesse’s long sentences stay long, and the irony in his praise of teachers and pastors is rendered straight, as he wrote it. The Swabian speech of the townspeople is given in plain colloquial English, without imitating any regional dialect.

The book has seven chapters. Each of the 895 paragraphs of the original appears here as one paragraph, including the scene breaks and the three songs. Spelling and punctuation are American. There are no translator’s notes; where a reader needs a fact, such as what Sedan Day was, a word or two in the sentence supplies it.