All the Different Germanies
Barbara Burns speaks to Malcolm Spencer, whose volume of translations, Thomas Mann, The Later Stories 1925–53, has just been published in the MHRA New Translations series.
BB. Nowadays Thomas Mann is still a household name, at least in the intellectual world. A Nobel laureate and a monumental figure in twentieth-century literature, he is celebrated for his anti-fascist stance and his unique ability to capture the psychological, political and cultural struggles of the modern era. What is the reason for Mann’s enduring importance and appeal, do you think?
MS. Thomas Mann (1875–1955) was the most publicly acclaimed author writing in German in the twentieth century. I think there were two main reasons for this acclaim. First, he lived through – whether in Germany or in exile in Europe or the USA – all the different ‘Germanies’ of that time: the self-confident but flawed Empire, the brief but troubled democracy of Weimar, and then the rise and fall of a catastrophic dictatorship. In the last decade of his life, Mann witnessed from a distance the re-emergence of Germany in the Cold War as an occupied and divided country. Second, Mann is a very serious and challenging writer – it takes a great deal of work to read his major novels such as The Magic Mountain and Doktor Faustus – but unlike some modernist authors, he writes in a classically elegant way; he’s a master of style and narration, he creates memorable characters and – if you have the time and concentration for him – his work is very rewarding to read.
I think that Buddenbrooks, his first novel, is the most accessible of his major works. It’s based on his own upbringing and family in the old Hanseatic city of Lübeck, which was in decline when Mann was born, as it was being supplanted as a port and commercial centre by the rising city of Hamburg.
BB. Mann is famous for his long sentences and complex syntax. Is his intricate, philosophical prose with its parenthetical thoughts the primary challenge for the translator, or are there other factors at play, too?
MS. Mann’s German is indeed complex. He often uses very long sentences, sometimes with comic effect, and he also chooses words that were not even in common use in his time. He couples adjectives together with a hyphen and includes philosophical reflection even in his shorter fiction. The translator must do justice to this complexity and should not normally shorten Mann’s sentences; he or she must also find ways round his frequent use of adjectival nouns.
It’s also a challenge to convey Mann’s humour, as the syntax of English isn’t well-suited, for example, to the mock-pomposity of the gentleman who narrates the novella Mario and the Magician. Another factor is the allusiveness of Mann’s prose, which is replete with concealed references to the poets and philosophers of classical Germany, such as Goethe, Schopenhauer and, above all, Nietzsche.
Finally, Mann’s prose is distinguished by its musicality. He uses leitmotifs, as Wagner does in his music dramas, usually a trait or action, to introduce a character; he repeats phrases to produce a climactic effect, or he structures a chapter or a novella like a piece of music that develops its themes from an initial prelude towards a final ‘coda’ or conclusion.
BB. The political allegory Mario and the Magician (1930) is perhaps the best known of the later works included in your volume. Why is this regarded as such a notable piece?
MS. Yes, the novella Mario and the Magician is certainly the best known of the five stories in this volume. It’s notable because Mann uses a story about a family on holiday in Italy (one that resembles his own) to explore the psychology of fascism, and it’s very prescient because he does this in 1930, well before the destructive consequences of fascism had become clear.
What I like about this dark and disturbing novella is that Mann doesn’t tell you what it is about. A lesser author would have ‘signposted’ the narrative, made us aware of how we should read it, but Mann leaves all its implications to the reader. The novella can be read on different levels, but I think one of the most relevant for us is that being a well-educated, liberal-minded person is no defence against demagogic evil, especially when that evil develops in a gradual but insidious way. Isn’t that familiar to us in the world today?
BB. Among the lesser-known stories which you cover, which one holds the most enduring fascination for you?
MS. I very much like Mann’s final novella, Die Betrogene, which is sometimes called The Black Swan in translation, though I prefer my own title, A Woman Deceived. Its main theme is familiar to readers of Mann – the connection of desire and love to illness and death – but he places it in the context of a mother/daughter relationship in which the roles have been reversed. What I like here is Mann’s mastery of narration. You have to read the story up to the last page to realise why he has told it.
BB. Thomas Mann owed much of his international success to the impact of English translations of his work. What can you tell us about his contemporary translator Helen Lowe-Porter, and about the publication of new translations today?
MS. The success of Mann’s first novel Buddenbrooks – and the award of the Nobel Prize in 1929 – meant that he was already accessible in English translations by that time. His novel The Magic Mountain (1924) was widely read in the English-speaking world, in contrast to other contemporary German novels of equal significance, such as the first two parts of Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930), a work which was hardly known in the English-speaking world at that time.
The translator whom Mann’s American publisher chose, Helen Lowe-Porter, was for the next quarter of a century the sole translator into English of his work. She had literary flair, but she was not a scholar of German, and by the 1970s it was realised that her versions contained many inaccuracies. Knopf commissioned new translations of the major novels from John E. Woods in the 1990s, and with the expiry of copyright in 2026 (70 years after the author’s death), further new translations of his work are now appearing both in the UK and the USA. So now is indeed a good time for Mann enthusiasts in English-speaking countries!
BB. What prompted you to undertake these translations? Is it something you had wanted to do for a long time?
MS. In 2013, I was teaching Mann’s Mario and the Magician at the University of Birmingham in a module of European Literature in Translation to first-year humanities students. I was obliged to use the Lowe-Porter translation because it was the only one available. It wasn’t just that this translation, which had first appeared in 1936, was often inaccurate and stylistically old-fashioned. The book, which was published by Vintage Classics and contained six of Mann’s later stories, had no introduction and notes, as was customary at that time. It did not acknowledge that the last story, The Black Swan, had been translated by Willard Trask in 1954 and not by Lowe-Porter, and the cover photograph, which showed the nineteenth-century French mime artist Paul Legrand in a Pierrot costume, had little relevance to the figure of Cipolla in Mario and the Magician, who is an Italian hypnotist and performance artist.
All in all, I thought it an unsatisfactory volume and that Mann deserved better, but I didn’t realise at that time how complicated copyright law is, and that it is different in the USA and the UK. I wrote twice to Knopf in New York and received no reply, and it was clear that publication in the UK of a new translation of Mann’s later stories would not be possible until copyright here expired.
BB. It is interesting that you place your University of Birmingham students at the top of your list of acknowledgements. In what ways have the students’ responses to Mann’s later works impressed and influenced you?
MS. You always learn a great deal about a book or film if you teach it in a seminar to students. That’s one of the privileges of being a university lecturer in the humanities! If I want to focus on one thing I remember, it’s that the students had just as much to say about Cipolla’s audience in Mario and the Magician as they did about the figure of the hypnotist himself. That’s important, because Mann is showing us that the demagogue and his audience interact in a symbiosis. The leader responds to their irrational wishes, and he would have no power if their hidden desires did not make them susceptible to him. We should remember the implications of Mann’s novella when we look at Trump’s presidency today in the USA. It is not just a question of Trump’s personality and power as a President, the irrational dynamic is also about the MAGA base, the reasons why they vote for him and identify with his rhetoric.
BB. Do the later stories convey a sense that Mann was conscious of his mortality, or that he was reprising motifs from earlier works?
MS. Thomas Mann was between 50 and 78 years old when he wrote the five stories in this volume. I don’t think the first four stories show a strong consciousness of mortality, and up until 1947 he was still preoccupied by his last major novel, Doktor Faustus. But I think that his last novella Die Betrogene (written 1952-53), here entitled A Woman Deceived, shows a marked awareness of his own mortality, even though the main character, Rosalie von Tümmler, is completely different from the author.
That is not true of Gustav von Aschenbach, the celebrated author in Death in Venice, who could be seen as a possible older version of Mann himself. You could indeed argue that Mann was reprising motifs from Death in Venice in A Woman Deceived, but the tone of Mann’s last novella is very different from that of Death in Venice. It’s more consolatory, and in it he relinquishes his preoccupation with a writer’s (often false) fame and status and instead narrates the unexpected love and death of a more sincere, less conflicted person.
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