5: Hilda Rosner’s Labor of Love: How a Mysterious Outsider Extended Hesse’s Global Reach

Hermann Hesse’s remarkable global impact would not have been possible without translation. Yet the vast amount of Hesse criticism has very little to say about the role of translators in facilitating what we recognize today as an extraordinary transcultural reach. Hilda Rosner’s translation of Siddhartha (New Directions, 1951), the first published English edition, appeared nearly thirty years after Hesse’s original text Siddhartha: eine indische Dichtung (Siddhartha: An Indian Poem, 1922). A cursory online search for “Hesse Siddhartha” is enough to demonstrate the impact and longevity of Rosner’s Siddhartha, which in both its Bantam and Penguin Classics editions dominates results in Google and is the edition displayed in Amazon and Goodreads at both point-of-sale and in online reviews, where it competes with seven retranslations. Yet for all this, Hilda Rosner herself has remained in total obscurity. I begin this chapter by unraveling what turns out to be a myth—the supposed influence of American novelist Henry Miller in the genesis of the first English translation of Siddhartha. I will then give a long overdue introduction to the intriguing Hilda Rosner by quoting from her letters to New Directions’ James Laughlin and Robert MacGregor. The letters provide new insights into the translation, production, and editing of Hesse’s American bestseller. Tracking the private responses to the translation from American Germanists reveals yet another strand in James Laughlin’s constructed embellishments around Rosner’s Siddhartha, one that directly involved the author and his wife Ninon Hesse. Looking behind the invisibility of the translator will take us into the actual negotiations surrounding the translation of Siddhartha into English. They turn out to be more interesting than the untested assumptions of existing accounts and far more richly entwined with the life of Hilda Rosner, an unknown, unmarried Jewish woman from Manchester, translating in the wake of the Second World War. I will end with a reflection on how Rosner’s translation fulfilled one of Hesse’s most heartfelt wishes.