The First of the Hallucinated
Talcs From Hoffmann. Translated by various hands, edited and with, an introduction by J. M. Cohen. With illustrations by Gavarni, (Bodley Head. i6s.) Mosr of us in England have come to E. T. A. Hoffmann, as to much of German literature, through music or via the French. It is the melodies of Offenbach's Tales that his name evokes, not the markedly musical structure of his own German prose • Casse7 Noisette we have probably read in the trantlation of Alexandre' Dumas, or in one of the two English versions which passed it off. as Dumas's own story. Mr. Cohen, who last year did his bit towards reawakening our interestin German literatureof the past by offering us a shortened English version of Goethe's autobiography, continues the good work with this selection of five of Hoffmann's best stories., Four of them are in nineteenth-century translations. Carlyle's' superbly unified, if idiosyncratic, rendering of The Golden Pot is preserved intact ; Oxenford's over-literal Sandman and Ewing's Story of Krespel and Mlle. de Scuderi have been altered only to. remove inaccuracies or the occasionally awkward phrase. The fifth, The Deed of Entail, done by Mr. Cohen himself, certainly achieves the greater ease of expression which,-as he rightly says, we have come to expect from translations today—but only, as he also modestly admits, at a greater cost to faithful rendering than his pre- decessors would have allowed. The general principles involved in this admission cannot be argued in a brief review; they are too closely bound up with a much •larger issue—the modern tendency to read far more and less well, to devour the matter and turn a deaf ear to the manner. In this particular case, however, no great harm has been done to the spirit of the original by the occasional omission of seemingly redundant epithets—presumably in order to preserve the effect of economy—though I noticed at least one significant echo that was lost thereby, Nor could I see the advantage of sacrificing the specific to the general in the rendering of certain adjectives. But the difficult operation of turning German periods into English rhythms has been most skilfully performed.
The illustrations by Gavarni which adorn the volume are repro- duced from a French edition of the eighteen-forties—though adorn is scarcely the word, for the artist has entered so completely into Hoffmann's twilight world, in which nightmare grotesques and visions of strange beauty intrude without warning upon sober day- light reality, that his drawings are an integral part of the stories themselves. Hoffmann's interest for his contemporaries lay precisely in this power to make the supernatural and the macabre credible by such a strong admixture of realism, such a wealth of circumstan- tial detail, that the reader is never quite sure on which plane he finds himself. He left his traces on the work of Edgar Allan Poe : his Frdulein von Scudery is the first detective story. But it is not so much as the inaugurator of the mystery-story and the thriller that he fascinates us today, but rattier as the forerunner of ICafka and of the Rilke of Mahe Laurids'Brigge. He was, as Mr. Cohen puts it in his admirably brief but informative introduction, the first of the hallucinated. His belief that the fantasies of our waking hours are intimations of a higher reality should commend him. to addicts of our present-day " metaphysicals," as should his preoccupa- tion with problems of consciousness to the Freudians.
It may be sad, but it is not inappropriate, that Hoffmann's name should live through music. He was himself an able musician and composer—it was not for nothing that he changed his third baptismal name to Amadeus—and an exciting music critic. His dramatic little piece on Don Giovanni is as memorable as Wagner's paraphase of Beethoven's Eroka. Heine's wonderful description of the violin-playing of Paganini or Thomas Mann's interpretation of Wagner's Tristan in the short story of that name. Here is that same blending of the supernatural with realistic detail that we find in the stories. It is in box no. 23 that the critic is surprised by the mysterious visitation of the lovely and tragic Donna Anna, who Interprets for him the metaphysical profundities which underly the I perb irony and Rococo graces of Mozart's music. Perhaps Mr. ftohen may think of including some of these pieces in a later volume. F.I.IZ.ABBITI M. WII KINSON.
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