Death in Venice: A New Translation Backgrounds and Contexts Criticism
Thomas Mann is widely acknowledged as the greatest German novelist of this century. His 1912 novella Death in Venice is the most frequently read example of Mann's early work.\ Clayton Koelb's masterful translation improves upon its predecessors in two ways: it renders Mann into American (not British) English, and it remains true to Mann's original text without sacrificing fluency. For American readers, this is the translation of choice.\ "Backgrounds and Contexts" includes Mann's working...
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Thomas Mann is widely acknowledged as the greatest German novelist of this century. His 1912 novella Death in Venice is the most frequently read example of Mann's early work.Library JournalMann's classic here gets a fresh interpretation from PEN Award-winning translator Neugroschel, who brings out more of the work's sensuality. Along with the title story, this edition includes "The Will for Happiness," "Tobias Mindernickel," "Tristan," "The Starvelings," and "Harsh Hour," among others.
Translator's PrefaceThe Will for Happiness1Little Herr Friedemann21Tobias Mindernickel51Little Lizzy63Gladius Dei83Tristan103The Starvelings: A Study151Tonio Kroger161The Wunderkind221Harsh Hour241The Blood of the Walsungs253Death in Venice285
\ Library JournalMann's classic here gets a fresh interpretation from PEN Award-winning translator Neugroschel, who brings out more of the work's sensuality. Along with the title story, this edition includes "The Will for Happiness," "Tobias Mindernickel," "Tristan," "The Starvelings," and "Harsh Hour," among others.\ \ \ \ \ BooknewsThis critical edition of Thomas Mann's 1912 German modernist novella reprints the widely praised translation by David Luke together with five critical essays from psychoanalytic, reader-response, cultural, gender, and new historicist perspectives. Each essay is accompanied by an introduction to the history, principles, and practice of the perspective and by a bibliography that promotes further exploration of that approach. A glossary of critical and theoretical terms and an introduction by the editor are also included. Distributed by St. Martin's Press. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.\ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsNew versions of 12 celebrated stories, including the famous title novella, many previously collected in Mann's seminal Stories of Three Decades. Neugroschel's persuasive "Preface" makes a strong case for fresh translations, given both this century's inevitable linguistic shifts and Mann's employment within individual works of specific vocabularies and styles (e.g., those of Wagnerian opera in the hair-raising "The Blood of the Walsungs"). And Neugr"schel essentially finesses the issue of revealing the stories' inherent sexuality; their author was, after all, a master of elegant indirection dedicated to muted presentations of matters that were anathema to both his public and his own sedulously respectable persona. That said, it's wonderful to have vivid, lucid English versions of Mann's sophisticated portrayals of sexual obsession and humiliation ("Little Herr Friedemann"), illness- as-metaphor in a tale ("Tristan") that concisely prefigures The Magic Mountain, and the transfiguring intersection of artistic with homosexual passion (Death in Venice, Tonio Kr"ger). Brilliant work, in any case, from one of the century's great writers.\ \
