Thomas Mann in Standard English Anthologies

Abstract

ITHE GROWING TREND in American colleges to expand their departments of comparative language and literature and to include in the offerings of their foreign language departments courses in English translation of the respective literatures calls for an examination of the texts in use. While a thorough survey of such translations will eventually have to be made, this paper purports to give nothing more than a cursory glance at three stories by Thomas Mann, Tonio Kroger, Death in Venice, and The Bajazzo. These are the ones which will probably be read in our college classes, since they have been included in such a standard collection as the German Classics and in the only two other anthologies of their kind, namely Great German Short Novels and Stories (Modern Library) and Modern German Short Stories (The World's Classics, Oxford University Press). Translations of stories by Thomas Mann have been chosen for examination for the reasons that this great German writer commands a dominant place in a course of German Masterpieces and that these three stories form the logical starting point in an introduction to Thomas Mann. His works, more than those of any other contemporary writer, present themselves as an integrated whole. In matters of content and technique innumerable threads lead from his early short stories to his works of greatest artistic achievement. It is therefore imperative that in the student's first encounter with them their basic problems be presented unadulterated and in the most precise rendering of the artist's own idiom, and that at least an attempt be made to convey to the student an artistic experience as little marred by erroneous or inadequate translations as possible. While a critical evaluation of the artistic achievement of these three translations as a whole seems beyond the scope of this paper, an attempt has been made to point out such obvious mistranslations as may hamper the student's understanding or seriously threaten his aesthetic appreciation of the stories.