Michael Hofmann writes:

English doesn’t really take kindly to foreign all-rounders. They don’t survive translation, and they don’t correspond to English – grocers’ – notions of what a writer is and does. Hofmannsthal, with no completed novels to his name, was probably always going to be severely handicapped. Of the three recent selections in English – a little sputter of interest from the last ten years that probably marks a diminuendo as much as a revival – only J.D. McClatchy’s makes any sort of effort to represent him in his fullness and variety, with a clutch of poems, a couple of stories, some essays, the first scene from Der Rosenkavalier, and two plays: that comedy, Der Schwierige, and the risible late tragedy ‘The Tower’, in an equally risible translation by Alfred Schwarz. The other two selections – cutting their losses, in the English manner – make the mild pretence that Hofmannsthal was your regular fiction dude. One offers up a selection of short fiction and prose poems, all of it hopelessly eclipsed by ‘The Lord Chandos Letter’; the other gives us Andreas, up there with ‘Kubla Khan’ as one of the great scraps of literature, though either laxly or unkindly in Marie Hottinger’s original 1930s translation, rather than her comprehensive 1950s revision that appeared in one of three great swanky Bollingen-financed volumes – with prefaces by Eliot and introductions by Hermann Broch – that constitute Hofmannsthal’s apogee, and demonstrate how far he has declined since.

(LRB 12 March 2009)

Hugo von Hofmannsthal is now chiefly remembered for the libretti he wrote for Richard Strauss and for his proto-modernist masterpiece, The Letter of Lord Chandos. This representative selection from his works, which includes new translations as well as classics long out of print, reveals an artist of considerable range and power, encompassing poetry, essays, short fiction and drama.

Princeton | hardback 502 pp. |ISBN: 9780691129099