Arno Schmidt, the author of “Zettel’s Traum,” in 1964. Photograph from DPA / picture-alliance / AP

In 1970, the German writer Arno Schmidt published his magnum opus, a novel called “Zettel’s Traum.” Its narrator is Dan Pagenstecher, an aging writer who lives in the fictional village of Ödingen and is an expert on Edgar Allan Poe. Dan is visited by a married couple, Paul and Wilma Jacobi, who are translating Poe into German. They have come seeking Dan’s expertise on Poe, and they have brought along their sixteen-year-old daughter, Franziska. She and Dan flirt intensely. The novel, which takes place over twenty-four hours, consists mostly of conversations between the characters. It is thirteen hundred and thirty-four pages long.

Schmidt, who was born in Hamburg in 1914, to a policeman father and a mother who would one day urge her son to “quit the whole writing thing” (she thought science suited him better), was a contrarian at heart. Many of his short stories, novellas, and novels are narrated by polymathic men who loathe organized religion, think having children is stupid, and hold authority in contempt (“A decent person is ashamed of being a boss !”). Their voices are electric with intellect and libido—flashes of light in a landscape darkened by human folly and destruction. Schmidt was drafted at the beginning of the Second World War, and was later taken captive by the British; upon the war’s end, he became a refugee. His fiction is frequently set in Germany during the war and in its aftermath, an ashen land of the lost and the displaced. “What I trust most are the beauties of nature,” one narrator says. “Then books; then roast with sauerkraut. All else changes, legerdemains.”

“Zettel’s Traum” is both Schmidt’s most famous book and his least read, and for the same reason: it is dedicated almost entirely to applying a Freudian theory of language to the works of Poe. (This was familiar ground: Schmidt spent years translating Poe, in collaboration with Hans Wollschläger.) Dan argues that words are composed of units of sound, or “etyms,” that reveal an author or speaker’s unconscious thoughts. To say “whole” is to think “hole,” for instance. With his ear cocked to sexual harmonics, Dan finds in Poe an impotent man who is possessed by the erotic and, unable to express his sexuality in bed, resorts to voyeurism, notably of what people do on the toilet.

In other books, these etyms are hidden, and must be found by a careful reader. But in “Zettel’s Traum” they are brought much closer to the surface, often emerging into full view. Aeronauten (aeronauts) is written as Ero’naughties, faculty as fuckculty, and fixen (fixed) as fickSn, playing off ficken, or “fuck” in German. Franziska’s Plisseerock (pleated skirt) becomes Pleas’see=Rock. Schmidt violates the rules of orthography and punctuation throughout the book, and its sprawling conversations cover James Joyce, trees, magic, the moon, and Xerxes, among many other things. After getting “Zettel’s Traum” out of his system, Schmidt would go on to write his best works. “I had to write it,” he said. “And such a book had to be written sometime.”

Late last year, I went to see the translator John E. Woods at his apartment in Berlin. Woods, who is in his seventies, has received numerous awards for his work; all that stood between him and retirement was “Zettel’s Traum.” Woods is perhaps best known for his translations of Thomas Mann’s major novels, but Schmidt’s fiction has been the backbone of his career. The first translation he published, in 1980, was Schmidt’s novel “Evening Edged in Gold.” Now Woods was tackling the big one. During my visit, Woods took down the German edition of “Zettel’s Traum” from his shelf with a groan—the torso-size thing weighs eighteen pounds. (Schmidt superfans buy lecterns to read it.) We sat with the novel open between us on the couch, and pages from his translation, composed in the course of ten years, scattered across our laps.

Each page of the novel measures eleven by fourteen inches and features three columns of text. The center is the widest: it relays the main narrative, unfolding in Ödingen. To the left are quotations from the works of Poe; text from the center column extends leftward when the characters quote or discuss the writer. On the right side are marginalia from diverse sources, such as dictionaries and recipe books. No typesetter had the technological means to exactly reproduce Schmidt’s design, so the writer simply published a photo-offset of his typewritten pages, which remained generously pockmarked by his cross-outs and edits.

“One could not tell if this was amazing, or if this was something for crazy people,” Susanne Fischer, the head of the Arno Schmidt Foundation, which manages the writer’s literary estate, told me. In the past few years, Schmidt has been increasingly recognized among critics and scholars as a radically idiosyncratic voice in postwar German literature, but Fischer and her colleagues at the foundation believe there is still work to be done. In 2010, the foundation released a typeset edition of “Zettel’s Traum,” removing the bar to entry for those who balked at the draft-like feel of the photo-offset. Woods’s English translation, “Bottom’s Dream,” published this fall by Dalkey Archive Press, is the latest effort to bring Schmidt to a wider audience.

At his apartment, Woods guided me through his translation of a page in which Dan and Franziska (also called Fränzel, or “Friendsel,” by Dan, the etym-hunter) have rejoined the others after spending some time alone. Wilma is growing suspicious about what’s going on between them; meanwhile, a zeppelin passes overhead. Here is an excerpt: