Death in Venice and Other Stories Read Free

Theodor Fontane), Mann can be said to have rescued German literature from a relatively fallow period. In scope and stylistic mastery, though not in content,
Buddenbrooks
can be compared to the great novels of Balzac and Flaubert, Dickens and Eliot, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Yet in
Buddenbrooks
and in his remarkable series of short stories, Mann progresses beyond the bourgeois concerns and mimetic techniques of Realism to expose the precarious psychological foundations of Western civilization, uncovering in the process the often dubious aspects of literary creativity itself. In doing so, he was perfectly attuned to what the social theorist E. J. Hobsbawm calls “The Age of Extremes,” the twentieth century—a century of rupture between the individual and society, a century of unprecedented improvement in Western standards of living and almost unthinkable bureaucratized destruction.
    The present edition has been selected and translated with this connection between author and society in mind. “Death in Venice” is, of course, a natural selection and among Germans “Tonio Kröger” and “Tristan” also have the status of classics in their own right. “Man and Dog,” one of Mann’s most everyday, realistic works, is also one of his most underrated—valuable for itsmastery of parataxis and as a companion piece to “Death in Venice,” its immediate predecessor. The remaining three short stories have been included because they contain themes also found in Mann’s longer works. “The Child Prodigy” is a quasi-clinical case study of the conflict between commercialism and art in twentieth-century cultural production. “Hour of Hardship,” narrated from Schiller’s point of view, reveals Mann’s fascination with the role of sickness and self-transcendence in artistic genius. Finally, “Tobias Mindernickel” introduces Mann’s strange preoccupation with house pets (specifically dogs) as mirrors of mankind’s ambiguous attitudes toward the unthinking, amoral vitality of the Schopenhauerian will. All three reflect and interact with Mann’s “major” works and shed considerable light on his creative development.
    My translations focus not only on content but also seek to render the complexity of Mann’s style into contemporary American English. For all his stylistic elegance, Mann writes anything but standard German literary prose and is therefore among the most difficult writers to translate. Because Mann’s long, complex sentences are written to be puzzled out, I have retained his paratactic syntax, rather than broken up the German into easily digestible units. I have also tried to preserve Mann’s often idiosyncratic emphasis within sentences, which is crucial to our ability to follow their sense. This is not just a question of following original word order. Owing to the differences between English and German, reproduction of emphasis often involves reformulation: the insertion of introductory, emphatic phrases, for instance, or the use of dashes to capture the interjectory character of the German relative clause. At the same time, the syntactic differences between German and English occasionally require the shortening, even elision of phrases to avoid overloading individual sentences—Mann’s prose is ponderous, but rarely clumsy. Rhetorical techniques such as assonance, alliteration, and rhyme are also crucial to reproducing the literary quality of Mann’s work. In order tocompensate for inevitable translation loss in this regard, I have not shied away from pursuing occasional felicitous opportunities in English for typically Mannian effects. In terms of word choice, I have sought to compensate for the drift caused by inexact vocabulary equivalents by striking a balance between the particularizing and the general. Moreover, I have made a distinction between those multipurpose German words