At the beginning of this year, the works of Thomas Mann entered public domain, which means that more translations of his novels and stories will become available. Oxford University Press has leapt into the breach with new versions of Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus, and Death in Venice and other stories. A rival edition of The Magic Mountain, by Susan Bernofsky, will arrive from Norton early next year. Papyrus Press has issued Lesley Chamberlain’s translations of Death in Venice and a group of stories under the title Love and Enchantment. I’m keeping track of these latest attempts to render Mann’s prose into English. It’s a tricky task, rife with hazards, as a dip into the new Faustus shows.
In his sublimely catastrophic tale of the fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn, Mann indulged in a fair amount of detailed musical description, leaning for help on such experts as Alfred Einstein, Bruno Walter, his own musician son Michael, and, especially, Theodor W. Adorno. He was meticulous about detail, and his writing on music rarely rings false. Ritchie Robertson, who translated Faustus for Oxford, indicates in his acknowledgments that he sought the same kind of assistance, but I’ve found several passages that stray into nonsense. Anyone with a basic knowledge of musical notation should have flagged the following:
And he played a chord, on black keys only, F sharp, A sharp, C sharp, added an E minor and thus exposed the chord, which had looked like F sharp major, as belonging to B major, as its fifth or dominant . . . The A, which by forcing a dissolution into G major creates a transition from B major to E major, led him onwards, and so he got via A, D, and G to C major and into the keys indicated by signatures . . .
Adding an E-minor triad to an F-sharp-major triad would create an arresting eleventh chord, but it would hardly have assisted young Adrian in his demonstration of the circle of fifths. It should, of course, be “added an E,” thereby making an F-sharp dominant seventh. Even stranger is “dissolution into G major.” Mann writes “gis” — the note G-sharp. And, in English-language lingo, it’s a resolution, not a dissolution. “Keys indicated by signatures” is a tautological attempt at translating “Verminderungszeichen versehenen Tonarten,” which means “keys marked by flat signs.” (In a later chapter, Robertson renders “Verspottung des Vorzeichens,” mockery of the key-signature, as “mocking the foreshadowing.”) Further down the page, we read how a sequence “continues to fluctuate between C and G major when one leaves F minor which in G major would be an F sharp.” Again, a single note — “f” — has been confused with a key. It should be: “…leaves out F, which in G major would be F sharp.” The late John Woods, in his excellent Faustus translation for Knopf, got all of this right.
Previously: Translating Mann, An Adrian Leverkühn Companion