StudienVerlag - Oapen

An Lion Feuchtwanger
London, 25.3.1947
Ms. m. U., Feuchtwanger Memorial Library
My dear Lion Feuchtwanger,
I shouldn’t worry about that reader’s report they sent you. The reader is our most
excellent „middle-brow“; she is sure to turn against anything really bad and against
anything outstandingly good; she is an exact thermometer of the „good“ bookbuyer’s
taste; but beyond that I shouldn’t take her literary opinions too seriously. […]
No, you can be quite sure that Hutchinson’s are full of admiration and enthusiasm
about yourself and about your outstanding work; and that more care and thought
is being given to it than to a good number of others put together.
What worries them is not an artistic but a purely commercial consideration.
There exist no real price limits for books, but no novel has so far been sold on a
large scale if it was priced above S 12/6. And at that price, it is practically impossible
to produce your book. […]
As for the translation, I only skipped through it, and I found it very readable
indeed. Rose is, as you probably know, the Reader in German Literature in the
London School of Economics (London University). He is a most serious and conscientious
man, who is as keenly alive to the problems of translation as you and I. In
fact, I went to a lecture of his on the subject a short while ago. He has his fixed ideas,
as we all, and one of them is that German is tautological and pleonastic, repetitive
and redundantly sound-painting – anything but logical and precise. He regards you
as one of the foremost German stylists because you are freer of those vices than the
rest of us. But still he would in a translation reduce three of your attributes to two
or two to one. (I shudder to think what he would do to our poor Arnold Zweig; in
fact, he would refuse to translate him at all.) The result of his method is bound to
be prosaic, pedestrian, colorless, but unobtrusively precise; and that, believe me,
is a great deal, as I know now, having seen the goods delivered by more „inspired“
translators. Think of the mess Eric Sutton made of „Axe of Wandsbek“. What worried
me in your case was not Rose’s dryness but that remark of our reader’s referring
to his use of cheap coin in the matter of metaphors. (Something costing „a pretty
penny“, etc.) It is a pedestrian’s effort to sit on a horse. My advice to you is that you
watch out for such instances rather than for those of under-coloring. And above ail,
get in touch with Rose directly; he is not vain, and I think if you wrap every criticism
in some flattering tissue paper, you will find him quite cooperative. Write to him c/o
Mrs. Webb. I myself shall by then be away; and quite generally my participation in
current affairs of the firm is most sporadic; I am getting panicly about time, I want
to write a lot, and I leave to Mrs. Webb everything except the most general issues
of literary policy, which we discuss over lunch from time to time; and even there
my influence is limited and purely advisory.
Roily and I go to the Continent in a few weeks, we want to go everywhere,
including USA. I hope to be in New York for the First Night of „Children of Vienna“
next autumn or winter […].
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