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Review of the new Pushkin Press edition of ‘The world of Yesterday’,
by Stefan Zweig
Pushkin Press has in recent years released a number of Zweig’s novels and novellas in new and beautifully presented editions. I particularly like the short stories and novellas released in small, truly pocket sized volumes of 100 to 150 pages, perfect for slipping into a jacket pocket for reading during a flight.
Zweig’s autobiographical masterpiece, ’The World of Yesterday’, was eagerly awaited in the new version released in November 2009. The translator is Anthea Bell, translator of many (but not all) of the pocket editions referred to above. The book itself has a handsome soft cover, with an appropriate picture of an early twentieth century Vienna coffee house scene.
‘Die Welt von Gestern’ has been hailed as the definitive depiction of the time of the sunset of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy (though to my mind, Joseph Roth’s books provide another haunting dimension to that period), as well as of the post-Great War era in Austria and the subsequent march to fascism. It also shows Zweig to be an archetypal European, at a time when Europeans were not much in fashion.
I have read the original edition, being the one first published in English in 1943 by Cassell, many times. I found it on my parents bookshelf, read it the first time about thirty five years ago, before I knew much about Austria, and have reread it several times thereafter, particularly finding a deeper understanding of this wonderful book after having lived in Austria for many years. I have also read it in the original German. My review of the new edition is therefore in relation to the original English edition, with comparison of both to the German.
Translations, if one knows the original language, are to some extent a matter of taste.
The first thing that struck me was that the new edition has considerably more pages than the original. Perhaps some of this has to do with the density of typesetting, but there is clearly a difference in style of translation. I do not know the name of the original translator.
What is remarkable is that the English translation was done rapidly, having appeared a year after the German edition was published in Stockholm in 1942.
If translation is all about the tension between literal translation on the one hand, and capturing the linguistic flow in the new language to achieve a more elegant style than a purely literal translation might allow, on the other, then I personally tend towards the purist.
Anthea Bell is more expansive in her translation than the original. This is not to say that her translation does not flow beautifully and her work is indeed a pleasurable read.
The problem with being able to read a work in the original language is that one inevitably translates as one would oneself. I am not a professional translator, but have sufficient feel for the German language to be pleased or displeased with a translation.
In the main, I find the original translation more to my taste, because it is more compact and because the translation is more accurate than the new version.
Some examples: Right in the first beautiful paragraph of Chapter 1, in which Zweig depicts the Austro-Hungarian monarchy into which he was born, Anthea Bell refers to the State as the guarantor of ‘durability’ rather than ‘stability’, the latter which I find a more literal and a symbolic translation of the German ‘Best ä ndigkeit’.
In a later chapter, Zweig talks of his exit from the hated Gymnasium. Bell translates this as a ‘closing’ of the door. The original translation captures the exit as a ‘slamming’ (‘Zuschlagen’) much better. Other times, Bell takes translation liberties, which I find to be simply incorrect.
When describing the pleasant summer scene at Baden to which Zweig retired in the summer of the outbreak of WW1, and talking of guests who could ‘lose themselves on a solitary path’ (my translation), Bell translates this as ‘losing their way as they stroll along secluded woodland paths’.
This seems to me both an embellishment and an incorrect translation and does nothing to capture the atmosphere any better than does the simple translation. (A ‘Weg’ is a Weg - by which process should it become a woodland Weg?) And so on. ‘My mother, whose maiden name was Brettauer, was of another, an international origin’ (my translation) or ‘My mother, whose maiden name was Brettauer, was of a different, more international origin’ (original edition translation) becomes ‘My mother, whose name was Brettauer, was not of the same origin. Hers was an international family’.
The latter is simply not what the words say, nor in my view does the expansiveness of the two sentences, when one would do, edify the original German.
At the end of many chapters in the new edition, useful notes have been added by the translator. In particular, the autobiography itself has nothing to say about Zweig’s private life and his two marriages.
One is somewhat enlightened by a helpful note at the end of the final chapter, which is important in the context of Zweig’s double suicide pact with his second wife.
In summary, the new edition is handsome and the non-German speaking world will find the translation readable and flowing.
Most importantly, the reissuing of Zweig’s works in these new editions by Pushkin Press makes Zweig’s works more prominent and accessible to the wider English reading public.
That this master author of the twentieth century should reach a wider audience than might otherwise be the case had Pushkin Press not embarked on this noteworthy venture, is to me more important than my conclusion on the translation itself, which is that I like it less than I do the original one.
Leslie Bergman
March 2010
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