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Buddenbrooks: the Decline of a Family (Vintage International)

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It is a truism that every generation needs its own translations. Lowe-Porter provided a valuable service by making Mann's novel initially accessible to the English and American publics. In Mr. Woods's sparkling new translation, the reader approaching Buddenbrooks" was conceived as a novella not unlike "Werther," or Mann's own "Tonio Kroger." Initially fascinated by the figure of the sensitive young Hanno Buddenbrook, the music-loving scion Mueller, William Randolph. Celebration of Life: Studies in Modern Fiction. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1972. He disfrutado muchísimo de la lectura, de sus personajes, de la veracidad de sus sentimientos, de sus imperfecciones y lo fácil que resultaba empatizar con todos ellos, me ha encantado descubrir a ese Mann tan analítico pero divertido, un observador de su tiempo y de cada detalle que conforman el carácter de una persona. Though, I must say that this was my absolute favourite moment of the whole book. I don't know if it was intended to be funny, but I found it hilarious:

Buddenbrooks" was the first product of the 30-year collaboration between Thomas Mann and the American translator Helen T. Lowe-Porter (1876-1963), through whose renditions most of his works became known to the English-reading Ci si appassiona alle vicende di questa famiglia forse anche per la nota marca autobiografica che ci rende un po’ lettori- voyeur nei confronti di un autore. Tóibín doesn’t adhere exclusively to the biographical record, and his most decisive intervention comes in the realm of sex. In all likelihood, Mann never engaged in anything resembling what contemporary sensibilities would classify as gay sex. His diaries are reliable in factual matters and do not shy away from embarrassing details; we hear about erections, masturbation, nocturnal emissions. But he clearly has trouble even picturing male-on-male action, let alone participating in it. When, in 1950, he reads Gore Vidal’s “The City and the Pillar,” he asks himself, “How can one sleep with gentlemen?” The Mann of “The Magician,” by contrast, is allowed to have several same-sex encounters, though the details remain vague. La última parte se me ha hecho algo más pesada, ya que introduce muchos personajes nuevos al hablar de las experiencias del pequeño Hanno - el heredero de la saga - en la escuela. Los retratos de los profesores y la narración detallada de las clases son hilarantes y seguramente son un retrato fiel de su propia experiencia.as, "I think I'll just have to give it all up." Mr. Woods not only remains closer in vocabulary to Mann; he renders Mann's style more faithfully than his predecessor, who did not hesitate to recast and shorten Mann's

I have raised my children with the sole dogma that "I read, therefore I am". Being a family, we can't keep from judging each other according to our own specific reading preferences, and we usually believe that "we are what we read". At the moment, my son is reading Buddenbrooks while I am working my way through Brothers Karamazov, and we like to compare notes, especially as both novels are focusing on complicated family patterns - with which we are quite familiar. They have several servants, most notably Ida Jungmann, whose job is to care for the children. During the evening, a letter arrives from Gotthold, estranged son of the elder Johann and half-brother of the younger. The elder Johann disapproves of Gotthold's life choices, and ignores the letter. Johann III and Elizabeth later have another daughter, Klara. ... The lowly servants, the courtesans, and the demi-monde: all of them speak the language of the street, raw and unpolished.In a virtuoso manner, Thomas Mann orchestrated this mass of voices into a panorama of society in the 19th century. The snobbishness on the part of the Buddenbrooks thus appears as a relic of a long lost time. It's a symbol of their inability to adapt to change and place their faith in progress. In the Buddenbrooks the finances and identity of the firm and family are inseparably intertwined. The family’s expenses are expenses for the firm. And profits from the firm accumulated as capital provide the income and living style of the family. The new Buddenbrooks house, the family symbol with which the novel begins, is a monument to itself. Family and firm reside there. For Thomas Mann as an author the deconstruction of his heritage is a creative act that allows him to reconstruct himself into a novelist. Before Buddenbrooks Thomas had only published short stories and the narrative he produced here is not continuous. Reading it is like admiring a series of Hogarth prints like The Rake's Progress or Marriage a la Mode. Some chapters could be split off and read as a story on their own. There are years between some chapters. The point of view character changes. At one point a chapter consists only of a letter sent from one family member to another. Mann created the novel as a federation of short stories, bound together by common characters, setting, images and the notion of inescapable decline.In this sense, Mann sets the tone for some themes in his forthcoming works, one of them being the refined and sophisticated artistic attitude opposed to the simple, healthy and pragmatic life of a merchant family, a poignant subject in this novel and one which could also have reminiscences of his own personal experience.

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