Thomas Mann was born in 1875, four years after German unification, and by the time he died shortly after his 80th birthday, with his homeland again partitioned, his prodigious writing and publishing had earned him many accolades, the 1926 Nobel Prize for Literature foremost among them. He was and remains, as translator Damion Searls puts it in the introduction to Thomas Mann: New Selected Stories, “one of the most solidly canonical writers of the twentieth century, and perhaps the most intimidating,” appearing to would-be readers “cold, forbidding, humorless, a kind of impenetrable high-culture obelisk.” The still-standard translations by H.T. Lowe-Porter, a contemporary of Mann, seem, to Searls, “like homework,” and in presenting new English translations, Searls writes that it was his goal to reveal that the author was “as warm, hilarious, and heartbreaking a storyteller as anyone.” These new translations feel less stiff (less “like homework”) than the older ones, and Searls provides good background and interpretive approaches in the introduction, but the success of the translations themselves is mixed and the scope of the undertaking limited.
The stories and excerpts from longer works in New Selected Stories span Mann’s career. “Louisey” (“Luischen” in German, “Little Lizzy” in H.T. Lowe-Porter’s translation), written in 1897 and published three years later, and “A Day in the Life of Hanno Buddenbrook” (excerpted from Buddenbrooks, 1901) date from Mann’s twenties. Death in Venice, published in 1912, and “Chaotic World and Childhood Sorrow” (translated as “Disorder and Early Sorrow” by Lowe-Porter) of 1925, come from Mann’s middle years when he was famous and his works were selling well in Germany and abroad. “My Childhood,” the last selection in the collection, comes from the unfinished novel Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, which Mann began in 1910 with the plan that it form a diptych with Death in Venice; he set the work aside in favor of The Magic Mountain and the series of essays later collected as Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, returning to the Felix Kroll novel four decades later, leaving it incomplete at his death.
The pieces collected here thus provide a general, if rather brief, introduction to Mann. Searls cites as “the immediate prompt for the present book” that “Chaotic World and Childhood Sorrow,” which had not been translated into English since Lowe-Porter did so in 1936, had aged out of US copyright law protection and into the public domain. Perhaps copyright issues are what dictated the length of the present book, consisting of five selections compared to the eight in Lowe-Porter’s Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories and the twelve translated by Joachim Neugroschel for Penguin’s 1998 collection. For the first major translation in a quarter century to include so little is a disappointment. He writes of the inclusion of “Louisey” that “it would give the book better balance” to “include a ‘minor’ story among the longer masterpieces.” Perhaps this is so — although what defines the story as “minor,” why the term is ironized with quotation marks, and what sort of imbalance would result from a preponderance of major works are left unexplained.
The introduction to New Selected Stories presents useful historical background as well as suggestions for two interpretive approaches, one focusing on Mann’s heretofore largely ignored racial/geographic themes and the other on homoeroticism/homosexuality. Searls emphasizes the former approach, drawing particular attention to Mann’s repeated engagement with his ethnic background, especially that of his mother, a Brazilian Catholic who was “a mix of Portuguese, Indigenous, and Black.” The translator’s remarks help contextualize Mann’s heritage (and his conception of it) within his time, namely during the Nazi period when party newspapers denounced him for his views as well as his “internationalism.” The recent scholarship on racial themes in Mann’s work summarized and quoted provides enough detail to familiarize readers with this approach without making the introduction unwieldy. The fiction’s racial and geographic themes — especially the “wild, thickly scented” “African shimmy, Java dance, Creole polka” in “Chaotic World and Childhood Sorrow” and the “young men costumed as hideous Africans” in “Louisey” — are likely to be of interest to most contemporary readers, and Searls’ introduction helps explain these in relation to Mann’s time and his oeuvre as a whole. Regarding the homoerotic/homosexual themes, Searls summarizes what Mann’s posthumously published diaries revealed of his homosexual orientation and cues readers to some of the homoerotic/homosexual undertones in the works included in New Selected Stories while helpfully cautioning against a fallacious “reduction to biographical identity,” often a danger when reading fiction with prominent autobiographical elements. While Mann’s first readers probably responded primarily to the mythological allusion and overt symbolism in Death in Venice and the post-Romantic figure of the doomed young artist in “Hanno Buddenbrook,” readers of today are more likely to see repressed homosexuality in Aschenbach’s fixation on the boy Tadzio and in Hanno and Kai’s curiously close friendship and their disdain for “crudely masculine ways.”
As for the translation itself, it does in many ways feel fresher than previous English translations, but there are some disappointments. (If Mann intended that he sound “like homework,” one may wonder if he should be translated according to his professed conception of himself or not.) Searls writes in the notes that he is “a fan of what’s sometimes called the ‘stealth gloss,’” which entails “slipping a little extra information into the translation.” This is not “putting in something that’s ‘not there,’” he avers, but “realizing something is there in the original.” But some of these stealth glosses and emendations erase some of the details that can help preserve in translation the sense of the original language and era. For example, “Doktor,” Searls explains in a note, is an academic honorific that, unlike “Doctor” in English, is not predominantly confined to medical doctors. Rather than preserve the slightly unfamiliar usage (and perhaps spelling), Searls translates “Doktor” as “Professor” (except for the one instance that provides the occasion for his note), which, whatever it contributes to clarity, shears off some of the text’s Germanness. Many other translation choices go even further in producing the wrong sound, such as “from the get-go” and “no-holds-barred” (making Mann’s narrator sound like a sports commentator), as well as “off of” and “inside of” and “outside of” (which are just plain bad English and sound anachronistic). Searls also seems to have penchant for the contemporary usage of “like” in place of “as if” or “as though” that is grammatically wrong and, where Mann is concerned, also aesthetically wrong. Gustav von Aschenbach, the aging writer of Death in Venice, at various points “felt like he was sitting there to keep watch” and “felt like his conscience was reproaching him” and “felt like he should just go home.” For the self-important Aschenbach (with his grandiose notions of his duty to sacrifice his life to art and to Europe) and his comparably grandiloquent third-person narrator to be rendered in the colloquial, informal grammar of 21st-century English is a misstep, one defensible neither for clarity nor sonority.
In addition to considerations of the merits of New Selected Stories, like any new offering of works by a past author, its publication occasions larger questions that remain open for readers to ponder. The first sentence of this volume’s introduction opens thus: “Thomas Mann is one of the most solidly canonical writers of the twentieth century.” It is certainly true that within his lifetime Thomas Mann was enormously respected (the Nobel Prize, the Goethe Prize, and many other accolades). Harold Bloom, in his 1994 book The Western Canon, listed nearly all of Mann’s works among his proposed canon for the 20th-century. But what is the canon? The canon might be thought of as one era’s reckoning of which parts of the past are most worth remembering; some works are of their time and have nothing to say after a few years (or even months), and others can remain relevant for decades or centuries. Which works are worth remembering and why, who determines this, is there a single canon (as Bloom seems to have argued for much of his career) or a multitude? — these and many other questions are worth considering, both theoretically and with respect to specific authors, for whom there is always the possibility of their appearing differently to each generation. Perhaps recent Mann-related publications indicate a renewal of interest and an emergence of new perspectives. 2021 saw the publication of Colm Tóibín’s The Magician, a novelized biography of Mann, and NYRB’s republication of Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. Do three works by or on Mann in three years constitute a resurgence of attention or coincidence? If it is the former, readers may ponder what about Mann seems newly (or again) relevant nearly 70y years after his death. Perhaps New Selected Stories will itself prompt new thorough considerations of the canon and Mann.
Thomas Mann: New Selected Stories presents the first new English translations of Mann in some time — nearly twenty years for Death in Venice and over eighty for “Chaotic World and Childhood Sorrow.” It is short on stories (only five, two of which are excerpts from longer works) and long on small failures that, cumulatively, detract from the effort. The stories give an apt introduction to the work of Mann, and translator Damion Searls’ introduction and notes provide helpful historical and interpretive information, with the attention to racial themes especially informative. The problems and paucity of material — where are Tonio Kröger, Tristan, Mario and the Magician, The Blood of the Walsungs, and other works included in earlier major collections? — mean that New Selected Stories is a worthwhile read and a good entry point for those new to Mann, but it ultimately falls short of displacing earlier English translations.
[Published by Liveright on February 28, 2023, 272 pages, $30.00 US]