I really love Stefan Zweig's writing. It's simple yet eloquent and manages to convey intense meaning. I've been so impressed by his work, having so far read The Post Office Girl and Beware of Pity, both being exceptional reads. It's taken me a while to pick up another book, in this case one of his later novellas, Journey Into the Past, but it's equally as remarkable and reminds me there are some authors who really should be shuffled to the top of the reading pile. Very briefly this is a story of two lovers separated by time and distance and when once again are reunited must determine whether their initial longing survives or has been blunted by circumstances beyond their control.
I know a work should stand on its own, but in the case of Stefan Zweig, knowing something about him really enriches the reading of his books. In the 1920s and 30s he was a popular and successful writer not just in Europe but abroad as well. Austrian by birth he came of age and was actively writing during a hugely fertile period in the arts and sciences. He was a contemporary and admirer of Freud and surely this must have informed his writing as there is always so much psychological insight to his characters' thoughts and motivations. According to the novel's translator, Anthea Bell, "An interest in exploring the interaction of mind, heart and body seems to have been in the air of Vienna at the time".
Zweig was an idealist and a pacifist and his strongly held ideas became even more fervent by the end of the First World War. Bell notes that while Zweig's personal life didn't influence his fiction, his beliefs do strongly come through in his writing most certainly in Journey Into the Past, which he began working on around 1924. By 1933 when Hitler became Chancellor Zweig knew which way the winds were blowing. He wrote to a friend, "My dear friend, I reply to you today, on May 10th...when my books burn on the bonfire in Berlin outside the University, where I once spoke about you to an audience of a thousand." Shortly thereafter he emigrated. He lived first in England, then in the US and finally settled in Brazil. Very sadly he and his second wife committed suicide in 1942.
"Many people now surmise, for instance Clive James in his clear and useful essay on Zweig as a cultural cosmopolitan, that he despaired because the old, civilized world of a pan-European culture, in which he had been so much at home, seemed lost already in a time of new barbarism, and while the Nazis might lose the war itself, they had already, as James puts it, 'won the war that mattered'."
I can't help but mention something about his biography (though I know I've already talked a little about it and others have shared very insightful posts about him), but I find it not only extremely fascinating but also unbearably sad as well.
In Journey Into the Past Ludwig is a poor tutor who is offered the job of private secretary to a wealthy industrialist. He rebuffs Councillor G's proposal that he should come and live with his family as he feels a sense of shame from his childhood spent in poverty. He doesn't want to be a nameless somebody stuck between upstairs and downstairs, but eventually thanks to the failing health of the Councillor he relents. He falls for the Councillor's wife who is kind to him and makes him feel at ease and soon discovers that his feelings of attraction are reciprocated.
When the Councillor asks him to travel to Mexico to direct a company there which will mine an important ore that has been discovered, he is at first flattered and eager to go, but it means separation from the woman he now loves. No time can be lost and he must leave immediately as the discovery is so lucrative and can make not only the Councillor richer but Ludwig, too. So Ludwig agrees. It will only be for two years, which surely will be bearable. And then war breaks out and neither Ludwig nor his letters may cross the ocean. And then nine years later Ludwig finally has a chance to return to Germany. Life has in all ways continued, but he finds his passion has still not waned for this woman.
I won't say more about the story and whether the two find their own happily ever after, but leave it up to you to read the story yourself. This is the second book I've read this month translated by Anthea Bell, who I think is a really marvelous translator. Happily she has translated a number of books by Zweig including Fear, which I am hoping to read this month as well. I found a really interesting interview with her here. As I was reading her afterword, and she was discussing the historical environment in which the book is set, she talks about the nuances she must be aware of and her translations must reflect them. She also talks about this aspect of her work in the interview. I've always thought a good translation is one where I can't tell the book has been translated and she mentions that as well. She calls Zweig's writing style both meticulous and condensed, which makes his books a challenge to translate. She certainly does an admirable job in her translations of getting everything just right.
"You read him in the original, and on the surface everything is limpid, lucid; then you start translating him, and you have to think hard about what exactly lies below the wording of every sentence."
I was a little disappointed to realize that I have both of Zweig's longer works behind me and now what is left (at least of his fiction) is only novellas and short stories. I am assured however, in the foreword, that Zweig is actually a master of the conte--"the tale told by word of mouth or letter". If Journey Into the Past is anything to go by, I think I am in for many little treats. Both Pushkin Press and NYRB Classics have been reissuing Stefan Zweig's books. I read Journey Into the Past as part of the German Literature Month.