The Human Touch

Thomas Mann is tall and lean, gray and thoughtful. On June he will be fifty-nine years of age and this Hitler business hasn’t made him look any younger, even if he doesn’t consider himself, technically, a refugee, Frau Mann pleaded for a brief interview, saying that they had been up since five in morning and that Herr Mann was tired. The interview was brief and, brief as it was, it was cut in-half by the necessity of translating my questions into German and translating the author’s answers into English.

“Of course Thomas Mann knows English,” a friend assured me, on the ground that English phrases are scattered through the pages of the original German editions of his novels. And Herr Mann himself almost justified my friend in his perception, for in the third minute of our abbreviated interview he interspersed English phrases in his German answers and perhaps had our interview proceeded for another ten minutes his dread of making himself understood in a subsidiary language might have been entirely dissipated and I might have learned something about, and from, the something about, and from, the greatest living German novelist.

But I did not get very much more out of the tired Mann than “life is quite English at Lubeck,” the Hansa city from which is the setting for his first world masterpiece, “Buddenbrooks,: and also that “the English and German tongues are related,” a statement proved by the excellent translations into English which his books have always enjoyed and proved the other way around by the excellent translations into German which Shakespeare’s plays have enjoyed. Beyond those remarks and a statement of his status with relation to Hitler Germany and his plans during hais ten-day visit in the United States, I left the Mann’s suite in the Savoy-Plaza with not much more than I had entered it.

THE ART OF TRANSLATING

There is always one sure-fire gag in vaudeville and on the radio. An American asks a Russian a simple question. The interpreter translates it into the language of the party of the second part, that is, Russian. Then the Russian answers the question. He answers it very thoroughly indeed. Voluble sentence succeeds voluble sentence and he pauses, he pauses only for a breath, and rolls on, while the American begins fidgeting obviously and audibly and even tries to break in to stem the flow. But to no avail. Then the Russian stops. He has answered the question. There is really nothing more to be said.”Well,” beg### the American of his interpreter, “what did he say?” And the interpreter, relishing the situation to the full, interprets. “He says ‘No’.”

It would be unjust to say that I enacted the role of the American, Herr Mann that of the Russian and Frau Mann that of the interpreter, but I could not help but recall that yarn when, at the conclusion of a long statement in German, Frau Mann interpreted very briefly indeed, leaving me with the impression that perhaps her husband’s remarks had been edited. A very shrewd and capable-looking woman is Frau Mann, probably the very type of woman a man of genius needs.

It is a very kind and thoughtful thing Alfred Knopf, Mann’s American publisher, is doing for the greatest of his German novelists. Not only will the first volume of “Joseph and His Brothers” appear on Herr Mann’s fifty-ninth birthday. June , but on the evening of the same day Mr. Knopf will give Herr Mann a testimonial dinner at the Savoy-Plaza, a dinner at which some of the leading literary notables of the New World will pay obeisance to a literary eminence of the Old.

When a man lives in virtual exile, as Herr Mann is living, it helps lift the cloud for him to realize that his person and his works still command the respect and the esteem of his peers; that there is an audience for, and understanding of, what he is trying to do, trying to say. Perhaps Herr Mann does not require testimonial dinners to set him up against his return to Zurich, his abode of exile, but few men are so self-sufficiently large not to require some sign from the rest of us that what they are doing has some weight and meaning. And should the adulation of his admirers at the dinner rise to rather silly heights, it will not matter so much because Herr Mann, not understanding English very well, will miss the more obvious phrases of flattery and Frau Mann, I am sure, will translate briefly.

For the information of those who may not have seen the book, the first volume of “Joseph and His Brethren” gives us chiefly the story of his father, Jacob. It is in the second and third volumes that we shall learn about Joseph and his brothers.