Tod in Vendei: ecco 2004 / Viking 1998 / Vintage 1989

1
" . . . nearly everything great owes its existence to 'despites'; despite misery and affliction, poverty, desolation, physical debility, vice, passion, and a thousand other obstacles."


" . . . almost every great opus that exists has come into existence despite everything--despite grief and torment, poverty, abandonment, physical weakness, vice, passion, and a thousand other hindrances."

" . . . almost everything conspicuously great is great in despite: has come into being in defiance of affliction and pain; poverty, destitution, bodily weakness, vice, passion, and a thousand other obstructions."



2
" . . . the only possible heroism was the heroism of the weak."

" . . . he could doubt the existence of any heroism but that of weakness."

" . . . all these human fates and many more of their like one read in Aschenbach's pages, and reading them might doubt the existence of any other kind of heroism than the heroism born of weakness."

3
" . . . art is life intensified . . . . "

"But even on a personal level, art is, after all, a more sublime life. It delights more deeply, it consumes more swiftly."

" . . . art heightens life. She gives deeper joy, she consumes more swiftly."


4
"Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden."

"Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous--to poetry."


5
"Too late. He must go on wanting what he had wanted yesterday."

"Too late. Now he had to go on wanting what he had wanted yesterday."

"Too late! He must go on wanting what he had wanted yesterday."


6
" . . . beauty . . . is . . . the only form of the spiritual we can receive through our senses and tolerate thereby."

"Beauty . . . is the only form of the spiritual that we can receive with our senses, endure with our senses. What would become of us if godliness, if reason and virtue and truth, were to appear to our senses? Would we not be devastated and devoured by the flames of love as Semele by Zeus so long ago? Thus Beauty is the feeling man's way to the spirit--only the way, only a means . . . . "

" . . . it is only with the help of a body that the soul can then rise to a more sublime contemplation."

"Didn't that will operate within him too when, filled with sober passion, he worked on the marble mass of language and liberated the slender form that he had seen in spirit and that he presented to humanity as an idol and mirror of spiritual beauty?"

" . . . nature shudders with bliss when the spirit
 bows in homage to Beauty."



7
" . . . passion dulls one's sense of discrimination and yields in all seriousness to charms that sobriety would treat as a joke or reject with indignation."

Thomas Mann
translated by
Michael Henry Heim
Joachim Neugroschel
H. T. Lowe-Porter

The ecco 2004 translation by Michael Henry Heim was my first Death in Venice, but that was just a random choice--it was the one that happened to be on the shelf of the Highlands-Shelby Park library when I stopped in . . . actually looking for The Magic Mountain. But I'm glad it was my first one, in part because of the most excellent introduction by Michael Cunningham, because that spurred my interest in the art of translation, and that got me interested in a little project: to read as many different translations of Death in Venice as I could get my hands on and to see if I could tell the difference between them. 

I usually take note of quotes that I find particularly significant while I'm reading a book, and that's what I did during my first reading of Death in Venice. When I started reading my second translation, the Joachim Neugroschel one from Viking, I decided that I wouldn't look back at the quotes I'd written down from the Michael Henry Heim version, I'd just write down quotes that I found striking. I just took a little pause in my reading of translation two and did a little comparison. All three of the quotes I've written down from the second version corresponded to quotes I wrote down for the first version. But there are some distinct differences between the two, however. In the first quote, for instance, the second version narrows down the focus--applies it specifically to literature. Actually it's even more specific than that, isn't it? It applies the thought to a writer's greatest literature, his / her highest literary achievement. I have to say that as much as I liked the first version of that quote, I like the second translation more. The second quote doesn't sound all that different to me, but I thought it was interesting that the second translation softened the certainty of the statement--"only" becomes "could." And as for the third quote . . . the first is good, but even when I initially wrote it down I thought, "You know, this is kind of obvious." It is so direct, so focused, so certain, that it doesn't have a lot of steam. The second translation makes it into a very eloquent and beautiful statement.

And that's as far as I've gotten at this point (as I am writing this on the fly), but I'll continue to pursue this comparison, and my intention is to continue it through the other translations I've acquired. One general statement, though: when I started the second translation, I first thought that it was inferior to the first. I think part of that is just a first impression inclining me to elevate it thing, and maybe the fact that the Michael Cunningham introduction was so wonderful influenced me as well, but there were textual reasons as well: there were several instances wherein Joachim Neugroschel made choices in diction which I thought were jarring; he chose words which were prosaic, and which I didn't feel fit into the Mannian context. But at this point--and I still have a way to go in the second translation, so this is subject to change--I have definitely come to prefer Joachim Neugroschel's translation. When I compared the first three quotes above, in every instance I thought that Neugroschel's versions were superior.

More to come. 

So I thought it was kind of interesting that I didn't find the parallel to the 4th quote noteworthy in the Neugroschel translation. I wonder if that's indicative of an "inferior" translation or just a lack of attentiveness on my part? I tried going back to see, but it got frustrating pretty fast and I decided to just let it slide.

The 6th quote isn't that different in the Neugroschel translation, but I did find that I wanted more of it . . . and then there were three additional quotes which were essentially extensions of that one that I thought were particularly beautiful. More evidence, for me, that the Neugroschel translation is my preferred one.

And then I read the H. T. Lowe-Porter translation. And her versions of the first two quotes seemed pretty much in line with Michael Henry Heim's translations . . . except for the fact that the first one had several clear violations of the proper use of punctuation marks. 


Here's another thing which I found interesting. In the first paragraph of the novella (Michael Henry Heim version), there's a reference to "the difficult and dangerous labors" of Aschenbach's writing. In the Joachim Neugroschel translation, this becomes "the difficult and debilitating work." And in H.T. Lowe-Porter's translation, it is "hard, nerve-taxing work." We also have David Luke's "difficult and dangerous,"     TO BE CONTINUED