Everyman's LibraryH. T. Lowe-Porter's English translation of Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann's DOCTOR FAUSTUS: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, Told by a Friend was first published on this day in 1948.
"This music of yours. A manifestation of the highest energy — not at all abstract, but without an object, energy in a void, in pure ether — where else in the universe does such a thing appear? We Germans have taken over from philosophy the expression ‘in itself,’ we use it every day without much idea of the metaphysical. But here you have it, such music is energy itself, yet not as idea, rather in its actuality. I call your attention to the fact that is almost the definition of God. Imitatio Dei — I am surprised it is not forbidden." --from DOCTOR FAUSTUS (1947)--from DOCTOR FAUSTUS (1947)
彭淮棟譯書的高潮時期的每一本，人們在數十年後重讀起來，都可以讓人有收益。80年代數本，如M. Polanyi 的《意義》…..
Raymond Williams《文化與社會: 1780年至1950年英國文化觀念的發者》台北：聯經，1985
I. Berlin的《俄國思想家》台北：聯經，1987。這本書約20年後在中國出版簡體字版。
他翻譯書，有時可達"會通"境界，譬如說，他覺得Said 的回憶錄《鄉關何處》(或譯《格格不入》)的某章，類似《魔山》的某一章。又譬如，Thomas Mann 書信的某句，出自歌德Goethe的：「打造藝術並無痛苦可言，但就像永遠在滾一塊總是必須重新往上推的的石頭。」 (參考 彭淮棟 《浮士德博士》(導讀和譯註本)頁.63「 尼采小說」一節；比較Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942) )
我約1997年，將一本80年代暢銷近200萬本的Quality Is Free 的新版Quality Is Still Free 《熱愛品質》，請他翻譯，我們的交情，當然他自己說費用多少，就奉送。我印象深刻的是他在第一段，機場的情境時卡住了，經我稍解釋，他就下筆如有神，很快交稿。昨天他說，翻譯這本書，第一次接觸到 Starbucks，這待查，因為那是1996年的書。
In French novelist Marcel Proust’s 1913 “Swann’s Way,” he describes his character driving down a Parisian street as the moon rises – showing the world anew.
“Proust uses moonlight as a kind of emotional X-ray, revealing the truth of power relationships between his characters,” explained Attlee.
“It is revealed to him that although during the day he’s a powerful man with money and position, and his mistress is a humble actress, in fact he is under her power.”
約1995年，我知道張旺山博士要從德國返鄉，特別請他買本哥德《義大利遊記》送彭淮棟，因為我知道他近日德文功力大進步 (其實，我考慮請他翻譯該書。他後來選擇的，又更重要)。我們三人，在中山北路老爺大飯店，有一次難忘的下午茶。後來，我買了中國翻譯版《意大利遊記》兩種---有點相互抄襲，一點德國版的封面/插圖等風味...... 約1997年，我有心將英文的品質管理名著都過來，W. Edwards Deming的、J. M. Juran的，由我自己作，Phil Crosby的 Quality Is Still Free，則請彭淮棟翻譯。他在讀第一段時，碰到些困難，經我解釋之後，他很快就進入狀況，準時交稿。稿費究竟多少， 我請他自己開價....
我與彭淮棟先生的關係比較親近。他結婚之初《新聞周刊》才創立不久，我們與創辦人都有聚會過。許多年後，我託人從德國買《歌德的義大利之旅》的德文版送他，所以對於他日後『談歌德的慾望』（《聯合文學》），不會意外。我印象中，他還翻譯過一本Fyodor Dostoyevsky:的書，待查。我也請他翻譯過，《熱愛品質》（Quality Is Still Free）。
彭淮棟翻譯作品約有（*為主要作品）：
T. Mann《魔山*》台北：遠景。這本是他的處男譯作，從英譯本轉譯。
Williams, Raymond (1966), 《文化與社會*》( Culture and Society 1780-1950. London: Penguin.,)
彭淮棟譯, 台北: 聯經. ，1985
Polanyi, M. 《博蘭尼演講集*：人之研究、科學信仰與社會、默會致知》彭淮棟譯，台北聯經，1985.
Michael Polanyi & Harry Prosch（1974/1984） 《意義*》(MEANING)，彭淮棟（譯），台北：聯經。
我與彭淮棟先生的關係比較親近。他結婚之初新聞周刊才創立不久，我們與創辦人都有聚會過。許多年後，我託人從德國買『歌德的義大利之旅』的德文版送他，所以對於他日後『談歌德的慾望』（聯合文學）不不會意外。我印象中他還翻譯過一本Fyodor Dostoyevsky:的書，待查。我也請他翻譯過，《熱愛品質》（Quality Is Still Free）。
彭淮棟翻譯作品約有（*為主要作品）： Thomas Mann《魔山*》台北：遠景，1979。這本是他的處男譯作，從英譯本轉譯。
Williams, R. (1966), 《文化與社會*》( Culture and Society 1780-1950. London: Penguin.,) 彭淮棟譯, 台北: 聯經. ，1985
Polanyi, M. 《博蘭尼演講集*：人之研究、科學信仰與社會、默會致知》彭淮棟譯，台北聯經，1985. Michael Polanyi & Harry Prosch（1974/1984） 《意義*》(MEANING)，彭淮棟（譯），台北：聯經。
乙：
紀念彭淮棟先生的一段友情 —兼談《熱愛品質》與歌德的《義大利遊記》》 Italian Journey (in the German original: Italienische Reise[ˌitalˈi̯eːnɪʃə ˈʁaɪzə]) is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's report on his travels to Italy from 1786–88, published in 1816–17. The book is based on Goethe's diaries. It is smoothed in style, lacking the spontaneity of his diary report, and augmented with the addition of afterthoughts and reminiscences.
丙：唸《浮士德博士》導讀譯註本
丁： 重新聚會討論
Book Of A Lifetime: Doktor Faustus, By Thomas Mann Sean O'Brien
Thursday 27 August 2009 23:00 BST
Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus is a work of exile, written in the US (1943 -1947), a bold and sometimes terrifying retelling of the Faust legend through the life of a composer, Adrian Leverkuhn. When I first read the book 30 years ago, it had the force of revelation in its urgent complexity. It is a novel of ideas of a kind rarely found in English, but sees thought and art as inseparable from character. It is in a sense the story of the early 20th century in the light of Fascism and modernism, yet neither history nor the individual is sacrificed to allegory.
A former theology student, Leverkuhn, clearly modelled on Nietzsche, breaks away from late Romanticism to pursue 12-tone composition (like Schoenberg, who was unhappy with the association). Leverkuhn's work exhibits great formal brilliance but also seems contemptuous of its human sources (the book's descriptions of music are among its many treasures). A supreme parodist, in his relationships he exerts immense attraction but in Shakespeare's words is himself, with tragic exceptions, "unmoved, cold and to temptation slow". Others destroy themselves for want of him, not knowing that he has long since contrived his own destruction.
The novel reaches into the mysterious folkloric Germany where the Devil is a familiar presence and the gifted over-reacher may well fall for his wiles. Mann's choice of narrator is both brilliant and, in artistic terms, supremely challenging. The Lutheran Leverkuhn's boyhood friend Zeitblom, a Catholic, is a classics teacher, anxious to do justice to his dead friend. He is fastidious and pedantic, but these mundane limitations help to dramatise the encounter with the demonic.
Franz Seitz's 1982 film, though well performed, misses the mediating narrator's sensibility, for Doktor Faustus is to a great degree about language, its power to consider what might be as well as what is. Zeitblom waits faithfully on the human shore as his friend moves indifferently out of reach, and then sees to his welfare when disaster occurs. His very limitations give this novel of ideas a questing urgency.
Written in the shadow of Hitler, Doktor Faustus observes the rise of Nazism, but its relationship to political history is oblique. One problem for non-German readers is to grasp that German culture precedes the existence of the nation, which lends cultural life an extraordinary definitive significance. What Mann regards as artistic heresy – that aesthetic obligations can outbid morality – may not simply be a symptom, but a contribution to the climate in which disease can flourish and come to power. The texture of the narration forbids simple summary, for Zeitblom, like many another, both knows and cannot entirely credit what is going on until it is too late to prevent disaster. In a tragedy, the act of will and the hand of fate may prove difficult to distinguish. Why can I never persuade anyone else to read this book?
Sean O'Brien's novel 'Afterlife' is published by Picador
The career of Thomas Mann’s modern Faust is intended to illustrate the political, artistic, and religious dilemmas of the author’s time. Yet paradoxically, the story of a former divinity student who bargains his soul and body to become a “musician of genius” is set in the wrong historical era. And the book’s major flaw as fiction—counting as minor blemishes the discursiveness, and the imbalance between theory in the first half, story development and human variety in the second—may be attributed to conflicts between Mann’s symbolic and realistic intentions.
Pacts with devils in human form, complete with “cold winds” and changing guises, are more appropriate to the sixteenth century than to the twentieth. Not that similar bargains with “the forces of evil” are uncommon today, being in fact the rule rather than the exception, but the agencies with which the contemporary kind are negotiated have been non-personal. And, apart from the Mephistophelian contract, the primacy in the novel of the theme of “sin,” the importance of theology, and the space given to the subject of witchcraft belong more to the age of Martin Luther than to that of a “hero” dying in 1940.
Moreover, at the core of the book is the “German question,” Mann’s belief that the seeds of National Socialism existed long before Hitler, and the recommendation to reject “the myth of a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ Germany, the bad [being] at the same time also the good.” This postulate might have been presented to advantage in a more remote period; in any event, the portrait of a moderately “conscientious” German inside the Third Reich in 1943-1945 is totally unconvincing, though the same character, Serenus Zeitblom, narrator and spokesman for the author, is credible at other times.
Mann, in California, writing in Zeitblom’s name, is simply unable to arouse any sympathy for his fictional counterpart in the Germany of the latter part of the war. In a novelist so skilled at creating atmosphere and background, the failure to establish the sketchiest sense of what life must have been like in the collapsing Germany of 1945 is astonishing; Zeitblom’s complaints about the aerial destruction of German cities, his fears of retaliations from the Russians, and his “consternation” at the Allied landing in Sicily are all unreal. Nor does he mention any privations, or the presence of soldiers and movements of war matériel, or even the effects of casualties on the families of friends. Furthermore, the voice behind his reflections on the German soul is transparently that of Thomas Mann, who provides Zeitblom with what are too obviously hindsights about the conclusion of the war. Finally, what could be more farfetched than a middle-European provincial’s reference to occupied Paris as a “Luna Park” for New Order Germans?
Though Mann superbly evokes the main periods of the book—the decade in Munich before the 1914 war and, to a lesser extent, the 1920s, both…
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