Lenz

by Georg Buchner, Richard Sieburth (Translator)

Overview

This classic of German literature—often hailed as the inception of European modernist prose—follows the mental breakdown of an 18th-century schizophrenic playwright, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz
 
Published after Büchner’s death, Lenz provides a taut case study of three weeks in the life of schizophrenic, perhaps the first third-person text ever to be written from the “inside” of insanity. An early experiment in docufiction, Büchner’s textual montage draws on the diary of J.F. Oberlin, the Alsatian pastor who briefly took care of Lenz in 1778, while also refracting Goethe’s memoir of his troubled friendship with the playwright. English versions of both these historical source texts here accompany Lenz for the first time in this bilingual presentation. Based on the best recent edition of the text, this fresh translation will allow readers to discover why Heiner Müller pronounced Lenz the inaugural example of “21st-century prose.”
 
Georg Büchner’s visionary exploration of an 18th-century playwright’s descent into madness has been called the inception of European modernist prose. Elias Canetti considered this short novella one of the decisive reading experiences of his life, and writers as various as Paul Celan, Christa Wolff, Peter Schneider, and Gert Hofmann have paid homage to it in their works.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780981955780
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	11/01/2004
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	199
File size:	183 KB

About the Author

At his death at the age of 24 in 1837, Georg Büchner also left behind Leonce and Lena, Woyzeck, and Danton’s Death—bold, psychologically, and politically acute plays that were also well ahead of their time. His dramatic works exercised a profound influence on Brecht and Ionesco, as well as on the composer Alban Berg and the filmmaker Werner Herzog.
 
Richard Sieburth’s translations include Gérard de Nerval’s Selected Writings, Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hymns and Fragments, Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary, Henri Michaux’s Emergences/ Resurgences and Stroke by Stroke, Gérard de Nerval’s The Salt Smugglers, Michel Leiris’ Nights as Day, Days as Night, and Gershom Scholem’s The Fullness of Time: Poems. His edition of Nerval’s Selected Writings won the 2000 PEN/Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize. His recent translation of Maurice Scève’s Délie was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize and the Weidenfeld Prize.

Read an Excerpt

The 20th, Lenz walked through the mountains. Snow on the peaks and upper slopes, gray rock down into the valleys, swatches of green, boulders, and firs. It was sopping cold, the water trickled down the rocks and leapt across the path. The fir boughs sagged in the damp air. Gray clouds drifted across the sky, but everything so stifling, and then the fog floated up and crept heavy and damp through the bushes, so sluggish, so clumsy. He walked onward, caring little one way or another, to him the path mattered not, now up, now down. He felt no fatigue, except sometimes it annoyed him that he could not walk...

Editorial Reviews

Büchner’s Lenz represents a brilliant and widely influential prefiguring of the modernist narrative imagination. For the first time, thanks to Richard Sieburth’s astonishing skills, we have a version in English that respects and communicates the radical inventiveness and stylistic singularity of the original. It is a work that fully breathes in the present.”
—Michael Palmer

“Richard Sieburth is one of handful of magnificent literary translators among us—witness his Hölderlin, Nerval, Scève, and Gershom Scholem’s poems. His extraordinary rendition of Büchner’s Lenz is both a superb version and a startling interpretation of a great and vital work. The beautifully produced little volume is amazingly rich, giving us Büchner’s "source’ in Oberlin, Goethe’s reflections upon Lenz himself, and crucial commentary.”
—Harold Bloom

“Like a jewelry chest, the covers of this book open on a gem of German prose, brought to its full radiance by Richard Sieburth’s splendid translation, accompanied by the German original as usually befits only poetry, and set among extensive notes and additional texts which allow the reader to appreciate its historical importance as well as its present powerful effect. I’d like to call Lenz a score, a score to go mad over . . . ”
—William H. Gass

“A totemic work of German literature.”
—Times Literary Supplement

“Lenz is a writer’s cry from psychic hell, and an astounding act of drawing from nature, where the nature in question is not hill and dale (though the landscape is in the foreground here), but the soul in distress.... Lenz recalibrates the literature of its time, and in this fine translation by Richard Sieburth, with its wealth of supporting material, it recalibrates our literature too, reminding us how unsturdy are these sands of the innermost self.”
—Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm

From the Publisher