Tonio, years later, finds himself once more at the same impasse.īegin all over again? It would be no good. And if it was the wrong way, then that was because for certain people no such thing as a right way exists. Mann often repeats key phrases throughout a story, but then again, we often crash into the same obstacles again and again throughout our lives, repeating our patterns and missteps. He went the way he had to go rather nonchalantly and unsteadily, whistling to himself, gazing into vacancy with his head tilted to one side.

Tonio struggles his life long to find a comfortable space between these two worlds and ends by concluding that there isn't one. Tonio Kroeger probably best exemplifies this dichotomy (although Aschenbach, choosing to renounce his highly-structured German life to stay in cholera-stricken Venice to observe beautiful young Tadzio is another). Mann, like many of his characters, came from such a split-personality home: His father was a Lutheran German senator, and his mother a Catholic Brazilian. the passionate, creative, Dionysian ones. Many of these novellas explore one of Thomas Mann's favourite themes (and one of mine, as well): the rational, disciplined, Apollonian aspects of the self vs. I hadn't realised that a translator might get exclusive rights to an author's work, and after reading David Luke's translation (permissible now that Lowe-Porter's rights have expired), I don't think one should. David Luke maintains that Lowe-Porter's translations were sub-par, listing some of her errors, which ranged from simple lexical misunderstanding - by confusing two similar German nouns, she described something as 'rootless' when it should have been 'savourless' - to meaning-altering gaffes. Knopf, had decided to grant her the exclusive English translation rights. I wrongly assumed that her translations were ubiquitous because they were the gold standard. Later, years after college when my German had rusted to the point of inoperability, I re-read it in English, always in translation by Helen Lowe-Porter.

I first read Thomas Mann's work in German. This section gave me pause and triggered some reflection on the role of translation. At the end of it, however, he explains his motivation to put out his own, new translation of these stories. The first 20% of the book is Luke's introduction, a predictably academic dissection of Mann and his work. I was re-reading the last two the first five were new to me.

The contents, in chronological order, are Little Herr Friedemann, The Joker, The Road to the Churchyard, Gladius Dei, Tristan, Tonio Kroeger, and Death in Venice. This is a 1988 Bantam collection of Mann's novellas, translated by David Luke, Lecturer in German at Oxford.

Death in venice and seven other stories