Translation of Rudolf Steiner's Calendar of the Soul
by William & Liselotte Mann. Copyright 1990 Roswitha Spence.
With kind permission of Hawthorn Press


Preface
The course of the year has its own life which the human soul can accompany and take part in. It may rightly find itself when such a sharing is sensitive to that which changes from week to week, and may feel how it gains strengthening forces from within. One will realize that such soul forces are waiting to be roused by participating in the meaning of the world's journeying and how it unfolds in the course of time. Thus one becomes aware of the delicate but vital threads that unite the soul with the world into which it is born.

In this calendar there is a verse for each week composed so that the soul can experience the appropriate part of the year's journey, and something of the life that can thrive in the soul when it is thus united. Then a healthy feeling of at-one-ness with the course of nature and a strong sense of self can develop, for undoubtedly, the soul bears a yearning to participate in the world's journeying by means of what these verses offer.

Rudolf Steiner
The Calendar of the Soul, 1918

Foreword
The question could arise why another English translation of Rudolf Steiner's Calendar of the Soul should appear in view of the fact that outstanding translations already are available in print. For those who do not have adequate access to the German language with its unique grammatical structures, vocabulary possibilities and rhythmic nuances, each translation may be welcomed as an augmented opportunity to penetrate into these verses more deeply so that their goal may be more realised also through a language idiom other than the original German.

The Calendar of the Soul (1912 - 1913) is a tangible evidence of an impulse which Rudolf Steiner wished to inaugurate on December 15, 1911. This impulse was to learn to read and to interpret the spiritual life through its many possibilities of manifestation in the physical world: through human beings, through their art, through their very way of life. The verses of the Calendar of the Soul, when they become part of one's inner life, help one in this act of interpreting the world of nature, the world of spirit and the human being's relationship to both throughout the subtle changes during the cycle of the year.

William and Liselotte Mann lived with these verses for many years. For the last seven years of William Mann's life he and Liselotte Mann worked week by week daily on each verse to discover the possibilities for a rendering into English. Thus it is likely that each verse received their meditative attention forty nine times. Their wish is to make them even more accessible to the English speaking world and to those many people who speak English as their first foreign language. This work bears witness to the translators' comprehensive knowledge and artistic penetration of both languages as well as their deep foundation within anthroposophy which is a wellspring of this Calendar of the Soul.

Virginia Sease
Goetheanum
Dornach, Switzerland
January 1990

About the use of this translation
In translating these verses William and Liselotte Mann felt that they should be accessible to all English speaking people world wide, with quite particular care for the Southern Hemisphere, which is why the season has been omitted leaving the name of the Festival to stand alone. The translators also wished that there be no "instruction" as how to "live into" this work, but rather allow the reader and meditant all freedom in their journey of discovery. The given dates are therefore a general guideline, just as the opening festival of Easter varies from year to year.

Roswitha Spence, 1990