“Even though he was a man in his prime, he seemed to be
ageing rapidly. He had been expelled from the paradise of simple faith in
Emperor and virtue, truth and justice, and, trapped in silent suffering, he
could see that it was guile that underwrote the world, the might of the law,
and greatness of crowned heads…”
--Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March.
"Sometimes Hofmann seems to nudge Roth in a direction in which Roth is not actually going: the pressure of a man’s fingers on a girl’s arm is “insistent” when in the original it is merely soft. Sometimes, on the other hand, he misses a telling emphasis."
"Joseph Roth, who died as Hitler began to destroy Europe,
was a great predictor of doom—civilization’s and his own. In this way, he was a
perfect man for his era, and perfectly unsuited to live in it."
BOOK EXCERPT: THE
LETTERS OF JOSEPH ROTH
The New Yorker Link
"Sometimes Hofmann seems to nudge Roth in a direction in which Roth is not actually going: the pressure of a man’s fingers on a girl’s arm is “insistent” when in the original it is merely soft. Sometimes, on the other hand, he misses a telling emphasis."
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2002/02/28/emperor-of-nostalgia/
“…At a little distance, Chekhov seems upright, decent,
civilised, broad in his thinking and feeling; a letter from him is a balanced
and considered document; if he goes on a bit, he sweetly apologises for it. He
has leisure to think forward and back and sideways; he is the master of his
(short) life, and sets his own terms, between Moscow and Yalta and Melikhovo,
with literature his mistress and medicine his wife.
Roth, meanwhile,
even before the Nazi takeover of 1933 (or the derangement of his wife in 1928),
was a man whose element was turbulence. He claims to have been an alcoholic
from the age of eight. He lived out of two suitcases in six countries. His
characteristic mode of progress was the somersault, his temperature generally
off the scales. His letters burn off the page with intelligence and fury.
Chekhov and Roth may both have died at the age of 44, and I love them both
dearly, but there isn't otherwise much in common between them.”
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