2023-05-20 15:46:30
Why reading Thomas Mann in English is fun
Thomas Mann (1875-1955)
Which: Getty Images/Hulton Archive
Thomas Mann? In German please! The magician from Lübeck is one of the German authors who are often translated. This can also be attractive for German readers. It is rare to find a cleverer literary interlocutor than the respective translator.
In the traditional Everyman’s Library, which has been delivering classics of world literature in English at affordable prices since 1906 – unfortunately no longer in the handy octave format – German-speaking authors are rare. Unsurprisingly, Franz Kafka is a frontrunner with three books: The Castle, The Trial, and Collected Stories.
Kafka is so popular globally, even among people who have never read anything by him, as a kind of literary meme that even the “Simpsons” could allude to him – for example with the “Café Kafka”, a student club, and one Halloween episode in the printed comics called “Metamorphosis” in which Homer turned into a bug. At the end, the word “konec” stood for “end” because the authors mistakenly assumed that Kafka was writing in Czech.
Thomas Mann ranks first with Kafka – and by no means only, like some other German-speaking authors, with titles that are only available as antiquarian books. “Buddenbrooks”, “The Magic Mountain” and “Doctor Faustus” are currently available. Mann is not as present in pop culture as Kafka. But the very German element in Mann’s books has always attracted readers abroad. Anyone who reads to understand Germany will not be disappointed.
Sometimes this can even be worthwhile in English. An avid German Thomas Mann reader who, in an irrational act, spontaneously bought Everyman’s edition of Doctor Faustus, translated by HT Love-Porter, is richly rewarded. Anyone who has read the novel several times in German expects the translation to be an experience that is similar to a conversation with someone who knows and loves Thomas Mann just as much – and he will be rewarded.
First of all, of course, you open the passages in which Adrian Leverkühn’s Professor Kumpf imitates Luther’s early New High German, and the letter about his infectious experience with a prostitute that Adrian wrote to his friend and biographer Zeitblom, again parodying Kumpf. It’s fun to read how Love-Porter translated these phrases into Renaissance English: “I bade my guide draw to an end by shewing me an inn where I could eat.”
Incidentally, there is an underlying connection that makes the English of the 1611 King James Bible and the Luther Bible amazingly compatible. William Tyndale, who was the first to translate large parts of the Bible into English, came to Wittenberg in 1524 to learn from Luther and Melanchthon. Although he could of course speak Greek and probably Hebrew as well, there are clear indications that he based his translation of the Bible more closely on Luther’s German version than on the originals. Although Tyndale was executed as a heretic, his translations later became the basis for much of the King James Bible.
Whoever reads Thomas Mann in English also follows these secret paths of German-English language and translation history.
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