It's so nice to see such an active conversation! I'm going to go back and read all the posts that discuss the book once I get farther into it, but I'm a good enough ways into it now and I'm enjoying it so far.
I went with the newer Woods translation. It was a tough decision and I really delved into it, but in the end I found both translations perfectly passable but neither particularly great. Both seemed awkward and not quite well translated at points. Because of the similar (though different) quality in this regard, I ended up with the Woods because of the minor difference that I'd read that the older Lowe-Porter translation excised small parts of the text and censored/altered a few other small parts of the texts. I didn't notice any censoring per se but I did find little examples of excising, such as the poet's dinner poem to the family. In the Lowe-Porter, one stanza was cut out. This is very minor in my opinion, but it gave me a reason to choose one translation over the other, especially in that, though I didn't notice any censoring-intended alterations in the beginning parts that I compared, I don't like the idea of them however minor they may be.
Anyway, I can tell that the writing isn't up to the same level as "Death in Venice", though I do ascribe part of it to the awkward translations. However, I do see glimpses of fine writing and I enjoy some of his nicely described scenes. One I'll share here is the garden scene from the beginning of Part 3. I love the description of a family sitting in a lovely sunny garden, with many of them reading as their study or divertissement. In an age where so few people read and it's almost an impossible idea to imagine an entire family sitting contentedly in silence with many of them reading, it sits in my imagination as something of a foregone ideal.
Quote:
One June afternoon, shortly after five o'clock, the family was sitting in the garden in front of the "Portal", where they had taken their coffee. They had set the light, rustic, stained-wood furniture on the lawn, because it was too warm and close inside the summerhouse, a single white room whose only decoration was a tall mirror framed by fluttering birds and two enameled French doors at the rear - which weren't real; if you looked closely you could see that the handles were just painted on.
The sparkling coffee service was still on the table, around which they sat in a semicircle; the consul, his wife, Tony, Tom, and Klothilde - sour-faced Christian was a little off to one side, memorizing Cicero's second oration against Catiline. The consul was busy with his cigar and the Advertiser. His wife had laid her embroidery in her lap and smiled now as she watched little Clara search the lawn for violets with Ida Jungmann, because now and then you could find them there. Her chin propped in both hands, Tony was reading Hoffmann's Serapion Brethren, while Tom tickled the back of her neck very circumspectly with a blade of grass, which she wisely chose not to notice. And Klothilde, looking skinny and old-maidish in her flowery cotton frock, was reading a story entitled "Blind, Deaf, and Dumb - and Happy Nonetheless", all the while scraping up cookie crumbs into little piles on the tablecloth, then transferring them carefully in a five-fingered grip to her mouth.
The sky and its few white stagnant clouds began to pale. The late-afternoon sun enhanced the color of the garden's tidy symmetry of paths and flower beds. The fragrance of mignonettes lining the beds ebbed and flowed on the breeze.
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