the man without qualities best translation

His father was an engineering professor his mother's father had been superintendent of the first European railway. Its capital, Vienna, was a blend of the chic and the raw: One of Musil's characters calls the Ringstrasse 'the only place in the world where you can see, in the midst of Western European elegance at its finest, a Mohammedan with his red fez, a Slovak in sheepskins, or a bare-legged Tyrolean!' Born in 1880, Musil grew up on the Kakanian sidelines - in small-town Austria and then Brno (now part of the Czech Republic). 'On paper it was called the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy,' Musil wrote of his home-realm, 'but in conversation it was called Austria.' TMWQ's omniscient narrator refers to it as Kakania, a sniggering pun on the formula kaiserlich-koniglich (imperial-royal), which stood for a political two-in-oneness every bit as abstruse as the Christian Trinity. Certainly for anyone fascinated by that empire - a brittle confection made up of historical happenstance, archaic ceremonies, disparate ethnic groups speaking unrelated tongues, and pervasive cynicism, all held together by military vigilance and a paternalistic administrative hierarchy that puts one in mind of an infinite mathematical regression - for Viennaphiles, TMWQ is a capstone, the literary climax of the cultural movement that also produced the psychology of Freud, the music of Webern and Schoenberg and the philosophy of Wittgenstein.

As for the underlying work - the story of a man's search for the right way to live as the Austro-Hungarian Empire rushes toward its twilight - TMWQ's champions place it alongside Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time in a triad of modernist masterpieces. This revised TMWQ is not only integral but a stylistic triumph. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike have given the 1954 translation a complete makeover and have translated for the first time all the omitted chapters and much of the other material. These fractional versions have now been superseded. And when an American publishing house picked up that translation, it committed butchery, printing a text that ended somewhere in the middle - a kind of 'Half-Man Without Qualities.' The first English translation, which appeared in 1954, omitted several chapters that Musil had pulled back from the printer for revision in the '30s, not to mention the further chapters, drafts, fragments and notes found after his death in 1942. Although The Man Without Qualities is one of the world's longest literary works and the product of nearly 20 years' labor, the author did not come close to finishing it.

$60 UNTIL NOW, American readers of Robert Musil's mammoth, dazzling, maddening novel have labored under a triple handicap. THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES Volume I: A Sort of Introduction and Pseudoreality Prevails Volume II: Into the Millennium By Robert Musil Translated from the German By Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike Knopf.

The man without qualities best translation