Translating Joseph Roth
Michael Hofmann considers why so many readers are discovering this Austrian author.

With the publication of Rebellion in January 2000, all the novels of the Austrian Jewish writer Joseph Roth (1894-1939) have finally appeared in English. By my reckoning, twelve publishers and eighteen translators have had a hand in the process - there are only fifteen novels! - and it happened in three distinct periods.

The first was in Roth's lifetime, when his best-known and most successful books, Job and The Radetzky March, appeared fairly promptly in English translation. Then there was a long delay until the 1980s, when Peter Owen took up the baton, and published some of the other titles, like Flight Without End and Weights and Measures, and then Chatto came along with The Emperor's Tomb and Hotel Savoy and others. (The connection there was Jeremy Lewis, who came across Roth while a book reviewer for the Times; reviewing some of the Peter Owen volumes, and noting Roth's combination of beauty and elusiveness, he wrote (this is from memory): '... Roth took himself off the map. He should be ruthlessly exposed.' This he then began to do, when he became an editor at Chatto.)

It was then, too, that I first got involved. Like Lewis, I first came across Roth as a reviewer in the mid '80s. I wrote about three or four of the books in the TLS and the London Review of Books; at the time, I remember, the Faculty Library in Cambridge did not stock any books by Roth, only one anthology or compilation of scenes from them - which seemed a barbarous approach to take, although it's one that Roth responds to brilliantly, perhaps better than any other author. I have never forgotten, for instance, the description of the Trottas' traditional Sunday lunch, Tafelspitz and Marillenknödel.

Then John Hoare, whom Chatto had retained to translate the books, must have died, and Roth devolved to me. I did two books, Right and Left and The Legend of the Holy Drinker. There was a quiet period in the '90s, before, simultaneously, Robert Weil, now at Norton, and Neil Belton at Granta were bitten by the Roth bug; Weil commissioned further translations, and Belton was able (there being no English Overlook) to republish Roth en gros if not als Ganzes. Granta have published The String of Pearls, Rebellion and (a non-fiction work) The Wandering Jews in my new translations, and brought back five other titles into print, all at regular intervals and in gracious designs. (Further books are in the pipeline: some of the reportage on Berlin and Paris, and Strawberries, the collected shorter fiction - and more of the backlist too.) I think it's the first time that there's been any security or plan to Roth publication, and I think readers are responding to that, as much as to the quality of the work (which has been there all along). Reviewers, too, have had a chance to place a particular work within its context (for what it's worth, my translations have come with introductions). There is a better standard of information; I remember reading on one jacket that Roth killed himself, which is not the case. If your own book-jacket gets it wrong, what hope is there for you?!

Now, looked at in one way, it may appear that this has been a haphazard and half-hearted and altogether tepid approach to take - typical, perhaps, of the way foreign authors are treated in English. But look at it the other way, Zeno-ishly, and you see it as something irresistible, as something that simply refused to go away, and which ultimately has amounted to a slow triumph. So what is it about Roth that has kept people hooked, in England and elsewhere?

Firstly, I think it is his willingness to tell stories, the quality of the stories he has to tell, and the confidence with which he tells them. Who else, in the twentieth century, would give you a sentence like: 'The Devil was Jeno Lakatos from Budapest,' and carry it off? Then, there is his capacity for beautiful sentences almost anywhere, seemingly effortlessly, and - as I saw in the under-furnished Cambridge library - unforgettable scenes, like the one near the beginning of The Radetzky March, referred to above, or, from The String of Pearls, the account of Taittinger's return to his country estate in winter (Chapter XXV). There is the view, held to everywhere in his writing, that life is great and surprising and unpredictable and that Fate is a powerful agency in the lives of men and women - which means that his books have both a rare compendiousness and a rare acceleration.

Even though he tells stories, and these stories are often dated back to the period preceding World War One - an irreparable breach in Roth's life, in Central Europe, and in the history of the century - he is not dated or limited as a writer or stylist. There are, in other words, equal numbers of nineteenth-century sentences in his books, and twentieth-century sentences. He is a brilliant describer of colours, sounds, seasons: the unexpectedly glamorous 'silver-grey' of dried mud, the alluring tinkle of the gypsy Euphemia's earrings, cold so intense that crows fall out of the trees. He is equally adept at plenitude and loss. There is then, also, a somewhat ragged quality about many of the individual books - but who wants perfection?! Randall Jarrell said a novel is sixty thousand words of discursive prose with something wrong with it. Roth's novels, while never anything so banal as a series or a polyptych, comfort and console one another. They diverge and cohere. To the reader (as I found for myself), they are habit-forming.

Then, perhaps fortuitously, there is the fact that while the books have not moved - not dated, not been superseded - we, their readers, have. Writing about the death of an empire and the end of an era - it is often pointed out that the nineteenth-century went up to 1914 - Roth perhaps seems to have more to say to us now than ever before. He writes about a part of Europe that has often seemed the edge of the known world, where once Austria collided with Russia, but where numerous peoples and races lived together or separately. At school, I was forever having to study the Habsburg Empire; it was only reading Roth, years later, that gave it human colour and meaning, to the point where it now strikes me as being the main story of our continent, in a direct line from Rome and the Holy Roman Empire through to the Coal and Steel Union and the EU - the attempt to hold different peoples peacefully and productively in suspension. He writes about an idyll and its imperilment, and there is no one remotely like him.

Michael Hofmann is a writer and translator.

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