A Forgotten Heart: A Comedy in One Act

Putlitz, Gustav Heinrich Gans, Edler Herr von undProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.5

Word count: 66K words
Chapters: 7

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Sydän unhotettu: Komedia yhdessä näytöksessä by PutlitzAuthor: Putlitz, Gustav Heinrich Gans, Edler Herr von und zu, 1821-1890,Language: Finnish, Class: PT: Language and Literatures: Germanic, Scandinavian, and Icelandic literatures, Release Date: Dec 11, 2016

Editor's review

This is a one-act comedy in Finnish. Its author, Putlitz, was a nineteenth-century German writer, and the work entered Finnish-language literary contexts through translation. A one-act play is short and tightly structured, building comic conflict around emotion and forgetting; it is well suited to observing how nineteenth-century European comedy achieves reversals of character relationships and the arrangement of laughs within a small format. For Chinese readers, its main value lies in offering a sample of a Finnish-language dramatic text, useful for comparative literature, translation studies, or research on the transmission of Nordic and German-language literature. Because it is a public-domain e-book, the text is readily available, but it lacks annotations and an introduction, so readers must supply the authorial and theatrical-historical background themselves. It is best read as a short theatrical text, with attention to the rhythm of dialogue and stage directions, rather than with the expectation of a complex plot.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Advanced Finnish learners who need short dramatic texts
Readers researching nineteenth-century European comedy and the one-act play form
Comparative literature scholars interested in the transmission and translation of German-language literature in Finland
Theatre enthusiasts interested in public-domain dramatic texts and willing to read the original

Not a good fit for

General readers who can read only Chinese and have no Finnish foundation
Novel readers expecting long plots and complex character development
Beginning researchers who need detailed annotations and scholarly introductions

Reading tips

First understand the basic structure of a one-act play, then read the whole text, noting how conflict erupts in concentrated form within a short space.
Finnish learners can read the dialogue aloud scene by scene, marking differences in usage between colloquial expressions and stage directions.
After reading, try retelling the character relationships and the chain of misunderstandings to check whether you have grasped the key comic reversals.
Read alongside German one-act comedies of the same period to observe linguistic and situational adjustments after translation into Finnish.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

What language is this book written in?

The main text is in Finnish. The author, Putlitz, was a nineteenth-century German writer; this is a Finnish translation of his play, a public-domain e-book released by Project Gutenberg, and reading it requires some foundation in Finnish.

How long is a one-act play approximately?

A one-act play usually has only one scene and a limited number of characters, and is markedly shorter than a multi-act play. As a single-act comedy, this book does not take long to read through and is suitable for reading in one sitting, then going back to review the comic foreshadowing and misunderstandings in the dialogue.

Can someone with no Finnish read this book?

Reading the original would be rather difficult, because the text has no Chinese parallel text or annotations. If you only want to understand the content, you can first look up a synopsis of the play and background on the author; if you want to read it seriously, it is advisable to first have basic Finnish grammar and common vocabulary.

Does this book have annotations or an introduction?

As a public-domain e-book, it usually provides only the main text and lacks scholarly annotations and an introduction. Readers need to supplement the author's biography, the nineteenth-century comic tradition, and the background of Finnish-language theatrical translation themselves in order to understand the text more fully.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Putlitz, Gustav Heinrich Gans, Edler Herr von und Author · German · 1821–1890

Putlitz, Gustav Heinrich Gans, Edler Herr von und (1821–1890) was a German writer and theatre manager. Public information about him is limited, making the details of his life difficult to set out. He wrote novels, plays and memoirs, and his work spans both narrative literature and stage writing, showing a twofold identity as a literary author and a practical man of the theatre. One of his works is held in this collection: the one-act comedy Sydän unhotettu: Komedia yhdessä näytöksessä, which indicates that his dramatic writing included comedy and circulated among Finnish-language readers. As a theatre manager, his practical experience may have informed his playwriting. On the whole, he belongs among the productive and pragmatic literary theatre figures of nineteenth-century Germany, writing on subjects close to the stage and to everyday life, and finding readers in the German-language theatre and publishing world of his time.