Agathe: or the Forgotten Sister, published by The New York Review of Books and translated by Joel Agee, while guilty of both kinds of pleading and misleading, nevertheless may offer something valuable to the small world of Musil translations in English. Agee's introduction to the volume is both sensitive and erudite, revealing a deep and vast reading and understanding of Musil. The focus on the Agathe material, furthermore, is a great relief (to me at least) from the frequent critical discussions of the novel, which tend to focus primarily on the earlier ironic socio-critical chapters involving the so-called "parallel campaign". This frequent myopic focus on the earlier chapters, seen recently in reviews of Menasse's novel The Capital, leaves much to be desired. While they are brilliant in their own right and quite useful nowadays for summing up global and national political problems, a focus on only these earlier chapters threatens to reduce the vast, philosophical, experimental, mystical novel to a witty social satire. Agee, like myself, was drawn to Musil's exploration of "the other condition," a mystical state of aesthetic-ethical timelessness; and the so-called "Agathe chapters" he has chosen to translate are rife with material related to this concept. Thus, I welcome any new translation that might draw the critical attention more deeply into what to me are some of the more interesting parts of the book. And what more seductive allure than Agathe, one of the most attractive fictional women of all time, comparable only to Rosalind of Shakespeare's "As You Like It"? Both women are witty, androgynous, daring, and passionate. Agathe has the added charms of being criminal, elegantly modern, existentially despairing, and Ulrich's sister. She is thus taboo; thus all the more attractive.
The material, then, included in this volume, is extremely engaging. Some of the most fascinating writing ever. Nothing to complain about there.
The translation itself, though certainly not better than that of either Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike's (whose 1995 Knopf edition is my gold standard of reference), seems mostly good. One can always find moments to quibble at (and I have found some odd and unjustified constructions or renderings on Agee's part), but I have also found some felicitous new turns of phrase or word choices, to be sure. On the whole, I feel (and "feel" is the operative word, since it is very difficult at this micro-level of small variations to establish what it is that makes one version better than the other) that Sophie Wilkins' and Pike's renderings are more elegant, crisper; they seem to capture Musil's tempo and particular lucidity of mind more. Or maybe I am just used to them.
Agee writes in his introduction that he read aloud passages of his translation to his wife; which is interesting, since Burton Pike has said that he struggled with his part of the translation until he discovered that Musil read aloud passages in progress to his wife, Martha. Pike then took to reading the German and English aloud, focusing on the all-important tempo of Musil's prose. Thus both translators used that similar method. Agee also eloquently expressed a translation theory, which I myself wrote of in my introduction to the collection of my translation of Musil's small prose, Thought Flights. Agee writes that "Musil hardly ever employs a common turn of phrase...it is a temptation for a translator to navigate strangeness in the original with something more familiar. In my view, this temptation must be resisted". In my words: "The writing and thought are devoid of cliches, and a translator must ever labor to resist choosing conventional phrases for original words and their syntheses...". The challenge in this methodology, of course, is in choosing words and phrases that, while unconventional, are not also clunky or "off" in ways that are not commensurate with Musil's carefully-tuned melody. There are times when Agee does not succeed; but translation is, as we know, almost impossible. And all of us are merely approximating.
The only real problem with this translation is whether or not it was needed, that it takes the material out of context, and that it has been presented as something a bit different than it is. Agee himself does not even suggest that there was anything wanting in the previous two translations (Wilkins-Kaiser or Wilkins-Pike), even very properly and nobly acknowledging that these former translations gave him an advantage in his own work, and explicitly noting in the text places where he adopted the solutions of the previous translators because he deemed, in those cases, that they could not be improved. Either he was being politic, or he did not find any problems in the previous translations that warranted the new work in question. Nor has he explicated a new or alternate perspective on how the text might be better rendered into English. Why then a new translation?
While it is not fully explained in the introductions of either the translator or editor, I was reminded by Walter Fanta, who presides over the Musil archive and Musil scholarship from Klagenfurt, that the project was conceived by a millionaire philanthropist, Nicholas Berwin, in collaboration with artist, Paul Ryan, who had created a rather lovely, eclectic artist's book that was exhibited at the Musil Museum. I had been contacted, years ago, through Fanta, possibly to be a translator or advisor for the texts of this very book! But I splashed cold water on the project, and was rightfully passed over for someone more enthusiastic. What happened to the artist's book and Paul Ryan?
Although Agee may not be, Berwin, a retired investment banker, who by his own admission, was unsure of his German, was very critical of the Wilkins-Pike translations, deeming them unnecessarily difficult and off-putting. Berwin also suggested that someone like Eckhart Tolle (the popular spiritualist guru) would be the right sort of person to write something about the mystical aspects of the novel. This judgment can be taken together with his advocacy of the need for a complete new translation of the novel! Agee thanks Berwin's charitable trust in his acknowledgments for a "generous grant". There I went again, letting my principles get in the way of maybe getting paid for my work! I have a constitutional suspicion of excerpts; I must admit, as I did to Berwn at the time, that I am a sort of purist. The kind of person who doesn't mind brother-sister incest as a theme in a novel, but who cannot condone people writing sequels or finishing deceased authors' works, or of presenting an excerpt as if it were a novel, more or less complete in itself.
I also (full disclosure) learned everything I know about Musil and about translation from Burton Pike. I cannot imagine his translation being surpassed by any new one, and did not appreciate Berwin's intention to turn Musil's extremely challenging, experimental novel into an easy-to-read best seller. I am not suggesting at all that Agee's translation travesties the novel, its style, or its content in this way. But the publication as an excerpt out of context does, I believe, effectively deflate the dynamic aesthetic effect of the whole (in so far as an unfinished novel can be conceived of as whole). Musil's build up, through cynicism, cold irony, alienation, humor, and wit, lays the ground work that allows for the shock and dramatic contrast between the earlier parts of the book and the so-called Agathe sequence. Ulrich's hyper intelligence, his mathematical-logical mind, are the necessary foundation for allowing the mystical mood that pervades the later passages. Ulrich's relationships with other people in the novel, his philosophical musings about reality, action, perception, and possibility, the historical pre-WWI setting, all are necessary context for what will come next. That being said, again, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the material, per se, or with Agee's translation. The problem is in presentation, marketing, and in everything that is left out. The backstory of Berwin's big plans for a retranslated, populist Musil tells us something about the premises of the publication; something the introduction leaves out. And also lends a special coloring to the special pleadings and misleadings mentioned above and explicated in what follows.
Edwin Frank, editor of the NYRB Classics, may have been misled himself (by Berwin?), but his suggestion, in the tantalizing last line of his introduction, that this volume fulfills George Steiner's vision of a publication of Musil's posthumous draft chapters is odd, to say the least. The bulk of this book is, in fact, made up of material from Part III of the novel, published in 1933 during Musil's lifetime. Not the Posthumous Papers at all. This book's chapters 23 to 30 are selections from the so-called "Druckfahnen" (galley-proof) chapters, withdrawn from publication by Musil, but included in both English translations of the novel, and the last five selections alone are revisions Musil was working on up to his death. Yes, these twelve chapters are, strictly, part of the Posthumous Papers, but only a very small selection of them. By contrast, Pike's translation of the "Posthumous Papers" includes over 600 pages of this material; the 1978 German version includes over a thousand pages; and there is more, included in the Klagenfurt Edition (previously an on-line database and soon to be online).
This thin volume that is supposed to fulfill Steiner's vision of a separate edition of the Posthumous Papers, includes only about 100 pages. Furthermore, the two supposedly new translations included in this volume are actually only different versions of chapters chosen by Pike. In rereading the correspondence between Berwin, Fanta, and the artist, Paul Ryan, I see now that there was some discussion about these "new," differing versions, which Berwin had insisted were far better than the ones that Burton Pike, the brilliant, erudite, and extremely nuanced international Musil scholar and translator, who had introduced the English speaking world to Robert Musil, had chosen to include. Why, I cannot fathom; nor did Berwin or Agee explain in what way they were better. In any case, while those Musil fanatics who do not know German can be thankful for two short new translations out of the many variants in the Posthumous Papers, none of this looks very much like a fulfillment of Steiner's vision of a volume that would reveal the genius of Musil's great later writing. If we were to look around for a volume that best fit that description, it would be Pike's translation.
It remains to be said in this regard, that not only do the selections included in this "Agathe" volume exclude hundreds of pages of delicious, brilliant non-Agathe writing, but they also exclude hundreds of pages of fabulous, incomparable, significant material that is strictly related to Agathe, including the all-important scenes that are available in Pike's version, describing Ulrich and Agathe's journey (for those interested in whether or not the siblings do or do not cross the line into incest: they do in these chapters), and some of my other favorites, "Attempts to Love a Scoundrel," "Special Mission of a Garden Fence," "The Three Sisters," alternate versions of the supreme "Breaths of a Summer's Day," and many others. While even the 1000 + pages in the 1978 German version and the 600+ pages of Pike's Knopf version exclude much fascinating material, and while each edition has made differing (and controversial in the case of the German edition) editorial decisions about the arrangement of the material, when it comes to the Posthumous Papers, this "new" volume, alas, offers relatively slim pickings.
To be honest, none of this put me in a mood very favorably disposed to give the translation a very fair reading. Mr. Agee, a fine translator and deep reader of Musil, is not to blame for this, nor, perhaps, is Edwin Frank of the NYRB, who may not have known about the real lay of the land in this complicated publication history; but I am troubled by this book. It seems to represent precisely the sort of use and abuse of culture, a trend toward sensationalist popularization, that Musil himself fought violently against. If he had wanted to be what he ridiculed as a "Grossschriftsteller" ("big-shot writer"), he could have foregone all the hardships of decades of arduous work and swiftly thrown together some potboilers. He emphatically resisted a sort of writing life he deplored as anathema to his idea of art's role as cultural, ethical-aesthetic impetus. Musil should be much more popular than he is with English-reading audiences. But if making this happen means leveling him down rather than raising the discourse level, I doubt he would be well pleased. If, on the other hand, this volume were to lead more people to read the beautifully, crystal-clear, brilliant and fascinating larger 2-volume Knopf edition, to read the plucked out chapters in their dynamic context within the whole unfinished masterpiece; if this volume were to lead readers to discover the other astonishing women in The Man without Qualities: Clarisse, Diotima, Bonadea, Rachel, Gerta; if this volume brought more people to a discovery of the rich, complex, experimentally daring, aesthetically astonishing, thought-provoking, challenging work of Robert Musil, it might be excused for tampering with a masterpiece.
After the publication of Part II of The Man without Qualities, Musil wrote,"A success of this novel would contradict the picture of the times that the novel, itself, presents. The absence of success would, perhaps, call the author's powers of persuasion into question, but at the same time, attest to the novel's conception. What should I hope for? Naturally, I wish for the response that you anticipate. But I don't believe in it. Later, perhaps much later".
The question thus remains: does this new publication suggest that Musil's time has finally come? Or does it suggest the opposite, that we are just as far away (or even further) from such a time as ever?
