Sacred Epigrams from the
Cherubinic Pilgrim

After a long period of neglect, Angelus Silesius (1624–77) is now recognized as the major religious poet of seventeenth-century German literature and his Cherubinic Pilgrim (Cherubinischer Wandersmann) as one of the century’s most important poetic texts.

Born in Silesia during the Thirty Years War, Johannes Scheffler received a Lutheran education in Breslau (now Wrocław) before studying medicine in Strasbourg, Leiden, and Padua. Shortly after his return to Silesia as court physician in the small duchy of Oels, he underwent a spiritual crisis that resulted in a controversial conversion to Catholicism and in the adoption of the suggestive name “Angelus Silesius,” under which he published the Cherubinic Pilgrim, a collection of nearly two thousand sacred epigrams that combine the exuberance of the southern baroque with the inwardness of northern mysticism. The bold paradoxes of Silesius speak to a modern religious sensibility while remaining rooted in a long German tradition that includes such figures as Hildegard von Bingen, Meister Eckhart, and Jakob Boehme. Some readers will find striking similarities with Buddhist thought; others may be reminded of the visionary flights of Vaughan and Traherne or the provocative aphorisms of William Blake.

Anthony Mortimer, already an esteemed translator from Italian, offers a generous selection of the epigrams from the Cherubinic Pilgrim in a version that is remarkably faithful both to the sense and the form of the original, preserving even Silesius’s rhyming alexandrine couplets. Complete with introduction, notes, and facing German text, this volume should interest not only teachers and students of seventeenth-century poetry but all those who are interested in mystical thought and its literary expression.

About the Translator
Anthony Mortimer is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and also taught for many years at the University of Geneva. Among his recent books are Variable Passions: A Reading of Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis” (AMS Press, 2000) and Petrarch’s Canzoniere in the English Renaissance (Rodopi, 2005). His translations of Italian lyric poetry for Penguin Classics and Oneworld (Dante, Cavalcanti, Petrarch, Michelangelo) have been widely praised. The Times Literary Supplement described his versions of Petrarch as “a deeply serious and accomplished work of literature” and welcomed his Cavalcanti as offering “a lucidity and precision in tune with the poet’s style.”