Novel
The Death of Virgil
Der Tod des Vergil
Hermann Broch · 1945
Opening lines
Stahlblau und leicht, bewegt von einem leisen, kaum merklichen Gegenwind, waren die Wellen des Adriatischen Meeres dem kaiserlichen Geschwader entgegengeströmt, als dieses, die mählich anrückenden Flachhügel der kalabrischen Küste zur Linken, dem Hafen Brundisium zusteuerte […]
Steel-blue and light, stirred by a soft, scarcely perceptible headwind, the waves of the Adriatic had streamed towards the imperial squadron as, with the low hills of the Calabrian coast slowly drawing near on its left, it steered for the port of Brundisium […]
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from projekt-gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Brindisi, in 19 BCE. Feverish, the poet Virgil is carried towards the imperial palace through the streets of the port, whose misery shocks him. During the night, judging false a work that has set aside the ugliness of the world, he decides to burn the manuscript of the Aeneid; the emperor Augustus, who has come to his bedside, has other plans for that poem.
Context
The text originated in 1936 from a short story, a version of which was read on the radio the following year, and grew during the three weeks when its author, seized by the Nazis in spring 1938, waited in a cell: it was no longer, he wrote, the death of Virgil, but the imagining of his own. He completed it in exile, in Princeton, at the beginning of 1945, after five successive versions. The book appeared in New York in June 1945, on the same day in German and in English, in the translation by Jean Starr Untermeyer. It follows four movements.
Who it is for
Five hundred pages of an almost actionless monologue, in sentences that sometimes run on for an entire page. To be taken in sections rather than in one go.
Prizes and reception
The best known of its author's books, translated in the following decades into Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese and six other languages.
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