the man without qualities best translation

Musil is interested in the passions that are sparked by physical love, but also the beauty and insight that Eros inspires when felt on a deeper level. Similar to Plato, Musil uses his characters that are sometimes quite serious, and oftentimes ironic or sarcastic to explore the topics of Eros (Love), beauty, goodness and morality. It can’t be a coincidence that Musil chose Diotima and Agathe, names from Plato’s Symopsium, for his prominent female characters. But I thought I would share some final ideas that kept coming to mind as I read Volume II in the Sophie Wilkins translation.

Musil, as much as Joyce, is an intensely personal and domestic bard, although all great writers can of course be seen, or can see themselves, as prophets of political doom, civilization’s collapse.It’s impossible to do any kind of a coherent analysis of Musil’s brilliant, enigmatic, philosophical, unfinished magnum opus. Musil’s writing is so disciplined, his word choice so exact, that sentence follows sentence with a pointedness that seems to come naturally. valuable addition to modernist European literature. Lisa Appignanesi, The New York Times Book Review In Agee's vividly contemporary and sensuous translation, Agathe zeroes in on a quasi-mystical adventure in living and loving. Musil’s sentences are never less than elegant (a handsome precision reflected in Joel Agee’s translation). Shortlisted for the 2020 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s PrizeĪgathe represents a kind of concentrate of the quests and questions of its monumental source material: in it, as George Steiner once wrote about part three of the original novel, ‘what was previous a kaleidoscope narrows to a laser’. The outstanding translator Joel Agee captures the acuity, audacity, and unsettling poetry of a book that is meant to be nothing short of life-changing. Agathe or, The Forgotten Sister reveals with new clarity a particular dimension of this multidimensional book-the dimension that meant the most to Musil himself and that inspired some of his most searching writing. Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is perhaps the most profoundly exploratory and unsettling masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction. Beginning with a series of increasingly intense “holy conversations,” the two gradually enlarge the boundaries of sexuality, sensuality, identity, and understanding in pursuit of a new, true form of being that they are seeking to discover. Each is the other’s spitting image, and Agathe, who has just separated from her husband, is even more defiant and inquiring than Ulrich. For years Agathe and Ulrich have ignored each other, but when brother and sister find themselves reunited over the bier of their dead father, they are electrified.

Agathe is the sister of Ulrich, the restless and elusive “man without qualities” at the center of Robert Musil’s great, unfinished novel of the same name.

The man without qualities best translation