Featured in The Stories We Tell
A century ago, the novelists Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann depicted a world recovering from war and pandemic. What can we learn from translating their works today?
I’ve been thinking a lot about the stories I tell when I translate because I’m in the early stages of a massive new retranslation project: Thomas Mann’s monumental
Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924). There are two earlier published translations of this novel, each admirable in its own way. The first, by Helen Lowe-Porter, was done in consultation with Mann and, when published in 1927, helped secure his international reputation. (It more recently served as an inspiration for Kate Briggs’s 2018 novella