 |
The
resurrection of a rare writer living at a grim time Feb
2nd 2013 |From the print
edition The
Emperor’s Tomb. By Joseph Roth translated by Michael Hofmann.
Granta; 185
pages; £12.99. To be published in America in April by New Directions;
$14.95.
Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk JOSEPH ROTH,
drifter, writer, drunkard, died in a café in Paris in 1939, aged 44.
Heavy
alcoholism and hard living killed him, but it was only a matter of time
before
the Nazis would have tried. After decades in obscurity, he has been
resurrected
as an important literary figure, praised for his laconic style and
eyewitness
testimony of the dark evolution of modern Europe. His most
famous work, “The Radetzky March”, a compressed panoramic novel of the
decline
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was first published in German in 1932.
Michael
Hofmann, a poet, translated the book into English in 1995 as part of a
larger
crusade to bring Roth to a wider audience. Now he is releasing a new
translation of its sequel, the last novel Roth wrote, first published
in 1938. “The
Emperor’s Tomb” (Die Kapuzinergruft) follows the surviving characters
between
two world wars, from 1913 to 1938. It begins with the young Joseph
Trotta,
grandnephew of the hero of the first novel, in his dressing gown in
Vienna as
his maid opens the shutters to the sun. After an interlude in Siberia,
the
story ends back in Vienna with Trotta closing the shutters of an empty
city
bar, walking out into a bleak dawn. Once young and foolish, surrounded
by
family and influential friends, he is now the last of the Trottas,
“alone,
alone, alone”. The city has changed, along with the country and indeed
all of
Europe. A darkness has settled in. Roth’s way
of tying vivid personal incidents to a wider story of continental
decline feels
more urgent here. His short chapters, with their abrupt endings and
fragmentary
first-person narrative, depict a puzzling modern world in which old
friends
talk politics in bars while “Death stretches his bony fingers” over
their
drinks. Trotta returns from the war to find his wife in thrall to a
crop-haired
woman professor of aesthetics. His family home, thrice-mortgaged,
becomes a
boarding house; his mother is dying, and he feels the city is no longer
safe
for his son. In the final chapter a group of old friends in a café are
disturbed by the entrance of a young man in leather gaiters who
announces that
“a new German people’s government has been established”. Trotta
describes this
“jackbooted gentleman” as wearing a “sort of forage cap that looked to
me like
a cross between a bedpan and our good old army caps”. The effect is
both comic
and alarming, conveying the alienation and fear of the moment. The novel is
full of such evocations; Roth’s characters, with their moustaches and
monocles,
dueling scars, shabby uniforms and borrowed finery, appear vividly
before the
reader. Yet he imbues his descriptions with a bleak awareness of the
passing
moment: “Our experience is fleeting, our forgetting rapid.” In a rather
Rothian project, Mr Hofmann has spent years working to reclaim and
translate
Roth’s scattered writings. In nearly a quarter of a century, he has
translated
11 of Roth’s books, both fiction and journalism. Last year he released
a hefty
compilation of Roth’s letters—which he describes as “largely IOUs and
SOSs”. In
his bravura introduction to “The Emperor’s Tomb” Mr Hofmann recounts
the
novel’s chequered origins: Roth, who had been living hand-to-mouth in
France,
had promised his publisher 350 pages, only to deliver less than half of
this,
and a text full of minor inconsistencies. After the “stateliness and
pageantry”
of “The Radetzky March”, he sees the “round-the-corner continuation” of
the
later novel as like a cartoon after the finished painting. Mr Hofmann’s
bold translation pays due respect to the lamplight streets of the city
and the
romantic feelings of its hero, yet allows for a character to be “gob
smacked”
and for a coachman to be a “cabbie”. It is the carefully wrought work
of a poet
in full sympathy with his subject and his subject matter, in all its
footlessness,
melancholy and ironic brevity. From the
print edition: Books and arts
|