One can imagine a belief in the Hesses’ wholehearted approval would have given Rosner considerable encouragement, and this is borne out by her impassivity in the face of criticism and by subsequent correspondence that reveals her having taken increasingly active positions. The strongest of these is her attempt to prevent counterculture LSD guru Timothy Leary from further associating himself with her (and Hesse’s) work. Leary’s 1962 article in the
Psychedelic Review, entitled “Hermann Hesse: Poet of the Interior Journey,” concludes with the advice that “before your next LSD session, you should read
Siddhartha and
Steppenwolf.”
1Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner, “Hermann Hesse: Poet of the Interior Journey,” The Psychedelic Review 1, no. 2 (1963): 181. The gist of Rosner’s objection can be inferred from a reply that Robert McGregor sent to her in October 1972 regarding her translation of Hesse’s 1932 novel
Morgenlandfahrt (
The Journey to the East, 1954). This had been published by Peter Owen in England on the strength of her
Siddhartha translation. Under Owen’s imprint, Panther Press was preparing an edition with an introduction by Leary. MacGregor writes:
Whether or not you can do anything to prevent the Timothy Leary introduction to your translation of
Journey to the East … would depend on what agreement you had with Peter Owen. However, you could try moral persuasion … writing a strong letter of protest to Owen and I suggest that you send a copy of the letter to Helena Ritzerfeld at Suhrkamp … she and Siegfried Unseld have put pressure on him before. … By the way, the statement … “before your next LSD session, you should read
Siddhartha and
Steppenwolf” is certainly not actionable under law. It would be considered “criticism” although pretty doubtful criticism from my vantage.
2MacGregor to Rosner, October 15, 1973. Hesse File, Folder 12.It is unclear whether Rosner made her objections known to Owen and Suhrkamp, but the edition with the Leary introduction was indeed released. What is clear is that Rosner considered Leary’s portrayal of Hesse to be inauthentic and an abuse of her translations which, in the cases of Journey to the East and Siddhartha, were the texts upon which Leary, like millions of other American readers, based his interpretations.
Sadly, there is much we still do not know about what motivated Rosner to take herself off to “a lonely farm house” in order to translate
Siddhartha, or who the friends were who visited to give what she once described as “moral support”
3Rosner to MacGregor, June 22, 1974. Hesse File, Folder 12. or why she needed moral support, or how her reason for translating, and the location chosen, may have shaped her prose. Being Jewish and having men of fighting age, the Rosner family must have been deeply affected by the conflict in Europe—just as
Siddhartha was written in the aftermath of one war, so was it translated in the aftermath of another. Tantalizingly, we might have learned more from another lost document referred to by Robert MacGregor in one of his letters to Rosner in 1965:
I was most interested in your long letter … regarding your memories of how you happened to translate Hermann Hesse’s
Siddhartha and the fact that this stimulated you to write it in fictional form. Of course, I would be delighted to read the story in that form, but we would probably have no way of publishing it. Perhaps you would let us have a copy for our publicity or editorial file …. It would certainly be of interest to someone someday how you happened to do it.
4MacGregor to Rosner, December 16, 1965. Hesse Files, Folder 4.MacGregor was right, it certainly is—and should be—of interest. In a subsequent letter, he suggests Rosner send the manuscript to the literary agent Laurence Pollinger and encourages her to continue to seek publication. It appears however, that this, like most of Rosner’s other attempts to exercise some agency over her creation, came to nothing. The same cannot be said for her unrecognized role in the global influence of the author she served. Even by 1965, the time of the above letter, her version had long been acting as a kind of transit station to the East.