No, that's not some Joycean take on 'woodsman'.
John E. Woods has been translating – retranslating – Thomas Mann's major works for over a decade now; I only recently found out about it. I've got The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus arrived today; Buddenbrooks and Joseph and his Brothers (which I'd always assumed was one of those unreadable 'masterpieces') are on my wish lists.
It's astounding: these are not merely readable, they're fascinating – I was slogging through the old, awful translation of Magic Mountain after I was in the hospital, and it was an unpleasant chore, tinny missed notes and pretentious messes in every sentence. But these new versions are whole new worlds – they're so good you start one just to see what it's like, and are drawn in so that you don't want to put it down.
Mann, unputdownable? (The bookman's adjective.) Amazing. I'm far happier with these than with the retranslated Prousts, which are still pretty tough going (partly because the second volume always drives me nuts, with its endless fake fascination with girls and smarmy emotionality). My friend Joyce, whose German is good enough that she's happy reading novels in the original, said she hated Man's pompous irony – but I'm perfectly happy with it; in fact I enjoy it.
And I'd never connected the pompous, dithering academic narrator of Doctor Faustus to the pompous, dithering academic narrator of Hesse's Glass Bead Game, but now the connection seems pretty obvious. I suppose Hesse thought of it first... and, as a doddering academic myself, are these strange, undependable narrators all too familiar?
So the old, awful translations are off to the charity shop. Rather satisfying, really....
•••
A couple of notes, a few days later, when about a third of the way through rereading Doctor Faustus (if it's really rereading when this is such a different version): there are clearly a lot more similarities between Faustus and The Glass Bead Game than the narrator – even though the tone is so different (Faustus eerie, diabolical, tinged with fear, while the Game is serene, emotionally calm), many of the same problems and relations abound – especially problems of intellectualism, isolation, detachment; and how hard it is for the intellectual to relate to the world, whether it's a world in chaos or a reasonable and slightly stuffy utopia.
It's also remarkable to relate it to reading Jung, and perhaps Freud: I read somewhere that Mann, fascinated by both psychologists, had written the Joseph tetralogy with Jungian ideas in mind, and something else – Magic Mountain, perhaps? – with Freud in mind; but it's probably more accurate to say that a mixture of both can be seen floating around in many of his books.
In any case, given that Mann – among others – was angry at Jung for not leaving Switzerland during the war, and for not resigning his post as president of a German-run health organization; and thus dismissed Jung as a Nazi –it makes sense that one of the disturbing threads of pre-war Germany Mann weaves together is the archetypal, the deeply rooted. This isn't new, of course – the whole problem of Blut und Boden, of das Volk, and the disturbing way that all sorts of archetypal and folk metaphysics got twisted into Nazism is something that deeply tainted many thinkers, most notably Heidegger – but it's eerie to see Mann put various assertions about the deep meaning and great path of German youth into the mouths of students, with diabolic echoes around it that suggest what is to come....
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