Susan Bernofsky directs the literary translation program at Columbia and is the author of a forthcoming biography of Robert Walser (Clairvoyant of the Small ). She has translated the work of many German writers, both modernist and contemporary, including Walser, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, and Jenny Erpenbeck. Her latest project is a new version of Thomas Mann’s masterpiece, The Magic Mountain. The following excerpt appears in the second chapter of that book, in which the young Hans Castorp is shown the family baptismal bowl by his grandfather.
On the back of the plate, the names of the patriarchs who had owned it were stippled in different scripts: there were seven names so far, each with the date of inheritance, and the old man in the cravat used his beringed index finger to direct his grandson’s attention to each entry in turn. The name of the boy’s father was inscribed there, along with his grandfather and great-grandfather, after which the prefix “ur” (great) began to double, triple, and quadruple on his grandfather’s tongue, and the boy’s head listed to one side, his eyes fixed in pensive or absentminded abandon and his mouth reverently slumbering as he listened to this ur—ur—ur—ur, a sound so dark it seemed to emanate from the crypt, from the very tomb of time, and to express a piously upheld connection between the present day, his own life, and the deepest past, making a most peculiar impression on him, as the look on his face revealed. Hearing this sound, he felt he was inhaling the musty chill that lingered in St. Catherine’s Church and the crypt beneath St. Michael’s, the effluvia of sites so hallowed that you involuntarily, your hat in your hands, adopt a reverential gait, swaying as you advance without letting the heels of your boots touch the ground; and he sensed his ears filling with the remote, cloistered silence of these echoing halls; religious sentiments commingled with intimations of death and history as this muffled syllable resounded, and all of this somehow soothed him, indeed it was perhaps only for the sake of this sound—to be able to hear it and hear himself repeating it back again—that he’d asked to be shown the baptismal bowl.
Translation © Susan Bernofsky, forthcoming from W. W. Norton.
