Jonathan Katz (Translator)
190819: previous read as [book:Beware of Pity|59149] exactly when i decided to reread this i am uncertain. perhaps i just saw it is a new translation, perhaps i liked the new title, perhaps i thought it is zweig i have somehow not read/heard of- then discovering it familiar, decide to go on. i have been reading in original french novels i have previously read in translations, looking for i do not know what, finding the process slow, laborious, annoyed i am doing this, so i decide to read other language translations into english. i will get back to french reading unknown books...
so i have read this before. i know what i am in for, but ask myself why i am reading it again, i know it is painful, psychologically acute, heartbreaking tragic etc... i know clearly even irony on irony, i know beauty of pathos... i find myself reading it paying most attention to poetics, that is, how it is translated, and though i do not have the previous copy on hand i try and recall differences. i do not recall the frequent use of ellipsis... but yes, the unbroken narrative voices, the writer, this man, the doctor, but why am i reading this? i stop, i start, i stop, i start, but the undertow sweeps me away. this is again exactly the right medium for the story: prose that incisively probes all those invisible, unspoken, continuous psychological states, that turbulent emotional terrain you the receiver must collaborate in forming with our first-person narrator... i am again swept into this tragedy- with one difference this time: i am impatient! i know what is coming, why make me suffer waiting and waiting? but you do not know what is coming, so my complaint is only that i have read it before...
and then, after reading, i come to this website and find i have read this book before probably almost two decades ago! how books read and life lived and loves loved and lost can change and then somehow not-change the affect of this work on me...