Albert Vigoleis Thelen
Albert Vigoleis Thelen (28 September 1903 in Süchteln, Lower Rhine region, Germany - 9 April 1989 in Dülken, Germany) was a German author and translator (from Portuguese).
Thelen was the son of booksellers Louis Thelen and Johanna Scheifes. After the primary school (1909–1913) he attended the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Schule (1913–1918).
Thelen's main work, The Island of Second Sight, which has been praised by many as one of the great achievements in German literature of the 20th century, appeared in 1953. It was soon translated into Spanish and French, later also into Dutch. Not until 2010 when it was published by Galileo Publishing in Cambridge, through the efforts of Isabelle Weiss, was it made available to English readers. The award winning translation by Donald O. White won the 2013 PEN Translation Prize.
“Talkativeness is a symptom of deep-seated pessimism. Without it there would be no pessimistic literature.”
“Small causes can often have large effects. Smaller causes can have even bigger effects, and the very biggest effects frequently have no cause at all. Witness, for example, the world. It was created out of nothing, and that has made it the worst calamity the world has ever seen.”
“I have a rule of thumb, one that will often enough rescue from one miserable situation only to plunge me into the next one. That is why to this day I have never made it as a general, a company executive, a cardinal, or a university professor, but only enjoy my status as a jester at my own private court and as a chronicler of the applied recollections of Vigoleis. This life-sustaining maxim of mine is as follows: in case of doubt, let truth be told.”
“Happiness is an art mastered by the very few. Genuinely happy people are as rare as Christians who believe in God.”