Nor did this literature perish with the end of the Hapsburg monarchy. Yet this literature still preserves the elaborate, detailed, microscopically correct image of an imperial civilization that it crumbles to pieces in the hands of the translator is but a sign of its original fineness. Those who now try to revive this joke in translations find a queer obscurity instead of the scintillating wit they had been led to expect. The style of life in the last years of Franz Joseph’s reign produced a literature so enamored of nuances, so absorbed in the spectacle of its own brilliant decline, that it found its end in a kind of private joke. It is very much an Austrian, and not a German, novel. It is one of the paradoxes of the book that it nevertheless attempts such definition. Ulrich, the man without “qualities,” has qualities galore. Its very title is misleading in translation. The English translation, one-fifth the length of the original, simply fails to make sense. And not only because of its language-I doubt even if German readers outside the boundaries of Old Austria are able to follow all the ironies and innuendoes of its style. Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is a great and tragic book. Translated by Eithne Wilkins and George Kaiser.
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