Several people who've read my Mann essay in this week's The New Yorker have asked me how this somewhat intimidating author might best be approached. I have no hesitation in recommending John E. Woods's series of translation for Knopf: Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers, Doctor Faustus. The first two are perhaps easier to digest, relatively speaking, than the last two, although Joseph is a vastly more entertaining work than many might expect. It does take a few hundred pages to get warmed up, but Mann's mastery of storytelling creates a remarkable degree of suspense around tales that most of us have known since childhood. There is also a strong untertow of mischief. Faustus is the most difficult of these novels, because of the density of the musical allusions, but it is also, I believe, Mann's greatest, deepest work. (My books The Rest Is Noise and Wagnerism are both written directly in the shadow of Faustus.) There are also several good translations of the stories: I recommend those by David Luke and Jefferson Chase. The classic early stories — "Little Herr Friedemann," "Tonio Kröger," "Tristan" — are perhaps the best point of departure. "Death in Venice" is unavoidable, although it is probably the most elusive Mann tale of all.
Alas, Woods did not go on to translate Mann's shorter novels: Royal Highness, Lotte in Weimar (first published in English as The Beloved Returns), Der Erwählte (published as The Holy Sinner). New versions are sorely needed. I'd read Royal Highness long ago in translation and thought little of it. Reading it more recently in German, I realized how sly it is, particularly in its portrait of the millionaire's daughter Imma Spoleman — Mann's tribute to his wife, Katia Pringsheim. (Prince Klaus Heinrich's hapless first attempts to strike up conversation with the arch Imma are a delight: "Do you like it better there than in New York?" "Just as well. It is about the same. It is everywhere about the same.") Lotte is particularly challenging because of the wild profusion of Goethe allusions. The monologue in the seventh chapter may be Mann's supreme feat of collage-writing. As much as Ulysses, this is a novel that needs to be read with a guide, such as Heinrich Detering provides for the Grosse kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe. We will probably never get such a thing in English, but an accurate modern translation would do wonders for this profound comedy of a book.
As for the prose writings, these are largely inaccessible, unless one searches out the old Lowe-Porter translations in used bookstores. Many of Mann's most interesting essays — "Bilse and I," "Occult Experiences," "On Marriage," his unpublished cri de coeur against McCarthyism — have never been translated. The return to print of Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man is a mixed blessing given the absence of the other work. Aside from the issues I've raised about Mark Lilla's introduction, there are also problems of translation. Walter D. Morris's 1983 rendering of Reflections is a valiant attempt at an impossible task, and it holds up reasonably well, although there are errors that could have been corrected: misplaced quotation marks (on p. 376, the sentence beginning "All the nations" is not from the Lensch essay); typos (on p. 326, "the principle of even freedom" should be "the principle of every freedom"); and awkwardnesses (it would be better to say that the "shores reecho with the sounds of a hunting horn," not a "French horn").
Appended to Reflections are two essays, "Thoughts in Wartime" from 1914 and "On the German Republic" from 1922. The latter was initially presented in bowdlerized form by Lowe-Porter, with the author's connivance; American audiences were deemed unready for Mann's peculiar strategy of celebrating democracy by way of Whitmanesque homoeroticism. Lawrence Rainey's version is complete but not especially accurate. On p. 515, we read that Gerhart Hauptmann "conducted himself as a man of letters"; this should be, "He did not conduct himself as a man of letters" — a vestige of the rhetoric of Reflections. A little later, we read, "Young men, please not that tone!" Mann in fact writes: "Jungmannschaft — nicht diese Töne!" — something like "Young teammates — not these tones!" What Rainey missed here was an allusion to the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony ("O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!"). Throughout the essay, Mann is fantasizing that he is addressing a crowd of boisterous young men whom he intends to win over to the cause of democracy with his seductive talk of comradeship. That he thinks a Beethoven reference will help his case is part of the charming absurdity of the exercise.
The translation of "Thoughts in Wartime" is credited to Lilla and Cosima Mattner. It shows a troubling tendency to simplify Mann's prose and drop phrases. Here is the opening in German:
Im Gebrauch der Schlagworte "Kultur" und "Zivilisation" herrscht, namentlich in der Tagespresse — und zwar der des In- und Auslandes — große Ungenauigkeit und Willkür. Oft scheint man sie einfach als gleichbedeutend zu verwechseln, oft sieht es auch aus, als ob man das erstere für eine Steigerung des anderen halte, oder auch umgekehrt — es bleibt ungewiss, welcher Zustand nun eigentlich für den höheren und edleren gilt. Für meine Person habe ich mir die Begriffe folgendermassen zurechtgelegt.
A faithful translation might read like this:
Great imprecision and arbitrariness prevail in the use of the catchwords “culture” and “civilization," especially in the daily press, both at home and abroad. Sometimes they seem simply to be mixed up as if they are synonymous; sometimes it appears as if the first is considered a heightening of the second, or vice versa — it remains uncertain which state actually counts as the higher and nobler one. For my part, I have set forth the terms as follows.
Lilla and Mattner make several trims and dispense with the idea of "Steigerung":
So often in today’s press the words “culture” and “civilization” are used inaccurately and arbitrarily. Sometimes they are treated as equivalent, sometimes as being on a continuum. And it is never clear which of the two—culture or civilization—is superior to the other. Here is how I understand the terms.
The translation goes on in this vein, setting aside fussy complications in an apparent attempt to make the writing blunter, breezier, more think-piece-like. In the process, it ceases to sound like Thomas Mann. Convoluted openings are part of his prose strategy; he often uses them as a foil for sharper, crisper utterances later on. In this case, the preliminary throat-clearing feels symptomatic of the author's psychological condition as he embarks on a plunge into politics that will do him considerable damage, as he is perhaps aware. Morris is much more faithful to that voice, in a way that makes Reflections a chore to read, but in a necessary way.
The best of the Mann biographies in English is Hermann Kurzke's Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art, although it perhaps goes too far in interpreting Mann's fiction as a reflection of his life. It also presumes a quite high level of acquaintance with the work itself. Anthony Heilbut's 1996 biography Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature is an excellent study of Mann through a sexual lens, even if it is a bit overzealous in seeking out a physical side to that sexuality, as I discussed in a 1996 essay for The New Yorker. Two absorbing recent studies are Tobias Boes's Thomas Mann's War and Stanley Corngold's The Mind in Exile. For those who read German, the field is of course far wider. Klaus Harpprecht's 1995 biography runs well over two thousand pages; the Grosse kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe has lately issued the later stories and Der Erwählte; and Fischer has released an excellent new edition of the Heinrich-Thomas Mann letters, containing many shorter notes that had previously gone unpublished.
