and helps him to say things he could never have dared say in his own language. Chauchat, the Kirghis-eyed heroine, veiling its strangeness in the garment of a foreign tongue. At the end of the first volume, he makes an extraordinary declaration of love to Mine. I am reminded of the hero of my novel, the young engineer Hans Castorp. Oddly enough, it is not a difficulty for me, but rather the reverse, that I have to discuss The Magic Mountain in English. Likewise, when I tell you freely of the book’s genesis and my experiences with it, I am relying on the healthy and sympathetic attitude of the American mind toward the personal, the anecdotal, and the intimately human.
In selecting my Magic Mountain for discussion, I base the choice on the sympathetic interest which this one of all my books received in America. Furthermore, since my work is still in the making and, I venture to hope, still reflects the present and its problems, it would be rather difficult, if not impossible, to criticize it with scholarly detachment - even if the critic were not, at the same time, the author. For, the thought of acting as my own historian I find a little confusing and, you know, there are few impartial historians anyway.
"The story of Hans Castorp that we intend to tell here not for his own sake (for the reader will come to know him as a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man), but for the sake of the story itself, which seems to us to be very much worth the telling (although in Hans Castorp's favor it should be noted that it is his story, and that not every story happens to everybody) is a story that took place long ago and is, so to speak, covered with the patina of history.SINCE it is certainly not customary for an author to discuss his own work, perhaps a word of apology, or at least of explanation, should occupy first place. "The story of Hans Castorp, which we would here set forth, not on his own account, for in him the reader will make acquaintance with a simple-minded though pleasing young man, but for the sake of the story itself, which seems to us highly worth telling - though it must needs be borne in mind, in Hans Castorp's behalf, that it is his story, and not every story happens to everybody - this story, we say, belongs to the long ago is already, so to speak, covered with historic mould."
0 kommentar(er)
