Dispatches from the World of Literary Translation

So today I started working on my new translation of Thomas Mann’s classic novel The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) as a fellow at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, where I feel very lucky to be able to spend the year. This book is certainly going to be a challenge. Here’s my first draft of the opening sentence, which I worked on for a while today in between the various phases of getting settled into the new workspace. Now I see that I left out a “so to speak” in this draft (always crucial to triple-check one’s work!), but I’ll post it uncorrected, since it’s a snapshot of a very early moment in this project. What’s the difference between “encrust” and “incrust”? The Oxford English Dictionary seems to like both equally; the current Webster’s flags “encrust” as the more common usage, but according to my Webster’s New International Dictionary 2nd edition (my copy was printed in 1951, but the edition dates from 1934), it’s the other way around, with “encrust” the slightly less common variant.

Today I also learned from Michael Neumann, who’s written an extensive commentary to Mann’s novel, that the composition of MM was far less straightforward than I’d realized. Mann, who’d published his first magnum opus (Buddenbrooks) at age 25, in 1901, was having a hard time writing something else of comparable weight to follow it up with. He kept starting new projects with great expectations that invariably turned out to be slighter than hoped, or picking things up and putting them down again. In 1912, at the age of 37 (still with no second great novel, gah!), he interrupted his work on the novella Death in Venice (an ambitious work, if short) because his wife had been stricken with a pulmonary infection and had to spend time at the spa in Davos to recuperate. (U.S. readers, please be advised that a spa in Europe isn’t where you get a pedicure and facial, it’s a serious health resort where you go for some medicinal R&R, sometimes drinking and/or soaking in pungent mineral waters from a local spring, and sometimes receiving light medical care. Spas can be tony.) Soaking up this atmosphere gave Mann the idea for a sort of companion-piece to Death in Venice, one that would be funny and grotesque where the former was solemn (“a Satyr play to accompany the novelistic tragedy of abasement,” in which the “fascination with death, the triumph of the utmost disorder over a life based in and dedicated to order” would be “reduced to the comical”). But first he had to hurry up and finish DOV, the first part of which was already being typeset (gah!). Oh, and he was also procrastinating working on a book about a confidence-man named Felix Krull that he’d been writing since 1910 (the original idea having come to him in 1905). Maybe you’re getting the idea why Mann would later say, “A writer is a person who has a particularly hard time writing.”

By July 1913 at the latest (still procrastinating Krull), he sat down to quickly write the funny little story set in Davos. Guess how that went. A lot more would happen in his life (and the world) before the book came out in 1924. Please please please let my translation of the novel go more quickly!

Since I can imagine that I’ll want to post a few more things about this 1000-page (at least in German) project before it’s done, I’m going to begin a practice I should have started for this blog nine years ago: tagging my posts. So if, in the future, you want to search for more recent posts about my attempt to Climb This Mountain, look for the tags MM and Magic Mountain.

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