Vivo; The Life of Gustav Meyrink by Mitchell Mike;

Author:Mitchell, Mike;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 991597
Publisher: Dedalus
Published: 2012-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

I would very much ask you to exercise just a little more patience regarding the MS of volume 18. At the time, the Parlograph rolls were typed out by a temporary typist and are unfortunately so abysmal that I can only use parts – will more or less have to do everything again, a fact which is already making my hair stand on end.

Was his habit of leaving out whole chunks of Dickens’s English another way of speeding things up? Could he not be bothered with passages he found awkward or tedious to translate? It is a temptation to which translators are subject. Some reviewers criticised this habit and Langen’s editors questioned it. Meyrink justified his cuts as part of his legitimate approach to translation.

Only sixteen of the planned twenty volumes appeared, the rest being abandoned because of poor sales. Mixed reactions from reviewers and readers might be part of the explanation, but another is certainly that there was a glut of Dickens on the German market at the time, at least five publishers bringing out editions in the decade preceding the First World War.

Despite the mixed reception at the time, Meyrink’s translation was recently brought back into print. It was highly praised by the writer Arno Schmidt, who called it ‘far and away the best German translation’ (of Dickens) and the literary magazine Buchkultur, said, ‘In comparison to others it is more elegant and fresher in its language, revealing what one might call a modern Dickens.’ Perhaps the Parlograph helped give Meyrink’s Dickens translation a fluency which other, more conscientious ones perhaps, lack. Another factor contributing to the fluency of his translations was presumably his former practice of reading out the Theosophical Society’s Siftings in German at meetings, which he claimed had given him fluency in extempore translation. And his reward for the work was not only financial – the way the brooding, menacing city of Prague becomes an almost animate presence in The Golem seems to owe something to Dickens’s London, especially its portrayal in Bleak House.

The four plays Meyrink wrote together with Roda Roda between 1909 and 1913 – Der Sanitätsrat (The Medical Officer of Health); Bubi; Die Sklavin aus Rhodus (The Slave from Rhodes); Die Uhr (The Clock) – were presumably also a result of his need to make money, rather than any interest in the theatre. This is even hinted at in one of the plays, The Slave from Rhodes. The character Diogenes is not the ancient philosopher, but a writer who is deep in debt: Diogenes is a pseudonym and the barrel is his hiding place from his creditors. He bewails the financial situation of the writer: ‘You can only live from writing once you’re well and truly dead. People only buy the classics … So far all I’ve had from my writing is a succès d’estime and an empty stomach.’ (quoted in Qasim, 67)

Roda Roda (the pen name of Sandór von Rosenfeld) was a Hungarian army officer whose first pieces appeared in Simplicissimus at the same time as Meyrink’s.

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