The Glorious Adventures of Tyl Ulenspiegl

PANTHEON BOOKS, $3.50

FOR hundreds of years, Tyl Ulenspiegl was the hero of numerous Low Country legends, but in 1869 Charles de Coster’s picaresque novel fixed the Low Country hero for all time in an epic masterpiece of classic proportions. Tyl’s sixteenth-century saga is the sometimes tragic, sometimes titillating story of a fight for freedom, of the fight of good men and simple men against evil overlords and slavemasters, and it is fitting that 1943 should see its publication in a magnificent English translation by Allan Ross MacDougall. De Coster’s original work was written in tortured and intentionally archaic French, but Mr. MacDougall’s version is in English as simple, vigorous, and poetical as the sincere language spoken by the man in the street. This is not really a translation, nor even an adaptation, but a recreation, definitive and brilliantly successful. And not only has Mr. MacDougall given English literature a new classic, but Pantheon Books has produced an exceptional piece of bookmaking replete with one hundred woodcuts by Belgian Frans Masereel.