Thomas Mann in English by David Horton (review)

David Horton’s Thomas Mann in English is a book that, had the normal publishing logic triumphed, would never have been published. It’s a single-author study of a non-Anglophone writer, it focuses on only one aspect of that author’s reception history, it does not employ trendy jargon or speak to any topic that’s ripped from today’s headlines, and it does not even have a sexy title. And yet it is a supremely interesting work, not just because it sheds new light on Thomas Mann’s oeuvre, but also because it raises thought-provoking questions about the future of literary study.

This is admittedly a strong claim, and a hurried reader who merely glances at the table of contents or thumbs through a few pages may well meet it with incredulity. David Horton works within the disciplinary framework of translation studies, meaning that his scholarship is situated at the intersection of linguistics and narratology, literary history and computer science. It abounds in references to concepts such as “address amplification” and to tools such as the “LIX readability index.” One of the chapters in Thomas Mann in English bears the unwieldy and rather technical title “Translating modes of address as an index of interpersonal dynamics.” All of which is perfectly defensible in an academic monograph, of course, but does not initially encourage high hopes that the book will live up to the title of the series in which it is published by charting “New Directions in German Studies.”

Horton’s subject is deceptively simple: he explores the transformations wrought upon Thomas Mann’s works when they were translated into English. His book is neither cultural history nor primarily a reception study, though Horton does include a detailed history of Mann’s works in English as well as a chapter in which he reconstructs the intellectual context that informed translation practices during the first half of the twentieth century. The majority of the book, however, concerns technical questions: how did various people render Mann’s notoriously convoluted syntax and his dazzling array of neologisms into English, how did they respond to his subtly corrosive irony, and how, finally, did they deal with the Du/Sie distinction and the multiple other discursive markers of social differentiation that contribute to Mann’s reputation as a “bourgeois” writer? Horton is nothing if not thorough in his pursuit of these question; he seems to have read not only every dissertation and every obscure article relevant to his subject, but has clearly also worked his way from start to finish through the thirteen-volume Werksausgabe of Mann’s fiction. His emphasis is clearly on the better-known works—Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, Buddenbrooks, and to a lesser extent Doctor Faustus and the Joseph novels—but he has something to say about almost every story of Mann’s that has ever been translated into English.

The importance of all this is three-fold. First, because Thomas Mann is generally acknowledged to be not only one of the most difficult, but also one of the most stylistically accomplished writers in German, a detailed study of past strategies to render him into English can provide valuable guidance for future translators of literary prose. The aforementioned chapter on modes of address, for instance, contains a list of no less than ten different compensatory strategies a translator might adopt in order to convey the distinction between formal and informal personal pronouns in English. I doubt that it was Horton’s intention to provide any such guidance when he wrote his book, especially since he scoffs at prescriptive translation studies of any kind. But that does not reduce the use-value of his work.

Second, Thomas Mann in English is arguably the first absolutely rigorous, comprehensive, and even-handed treatment of a subject that has already attracted much attention in the scholarly literature, namely the impact of Mann’s first translator, Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter. Roughly a dozen studies of her work...