The first complete (but slightly abridged) English text of Döblin’s challenging dystopia is now ready for download, along with a separate document containing the omitted parts. Readers can (I hope) enjoy reading the whole book to the end, while serious fans can consider Döblin’s intentions in light of the full text. .
DOWNLOADS
UPDATE 1: The Translator’s Introduction in Vol 1 has been revised from the version posted on 6 March 2019, as has the preamble to the Omitted Passages.
UPDATE 2: Since MOG will be published as a book /ebook in spring 2020, the downloads have been de-activated.
Volume 1 The Urals War (contains Parts 1 – 5) PDF 166 pages, 1.9MB
Volume 2 The Greenland Venture (c0ntains parts 6 – 9) PDF 168 pages, 1.MB
Passages omitted from the published text can still be downloaded here:
MOG – Omitted Passages PDF 940KB
Notes on the Translation
Döblin’s quirky modernistic prose is rife with deviant sentence structures. These are tricky to reproduce in English – our nouns are not capitalised, our morphology is stripped down (e.g. does ‘lived’ match ‘gelebt’ or ‘lebte’?). The deviant punctuation with many comma-less lists of nouns, verbs, adjectives is retained insofar as it does not cause ambiguity. I have tried to retain some modernist flavour while not burdening the reader with excessively contorted prose, while also striving to convey the immense vigour of the original, with its cacophony of sounds, its vivid sights and restless movements.
Döblin presents the reader of what is already a challenging work with a wall of text: paragraphs often pages long (not uncommon in German literature); sections within each Part marked only by a single line break. I have adopted a more English paragraphing, and have supplied short section headings.
I have silently amended typos, misspellings and clear geographical errors (e.g. ‘east’ where the context requires ‘west’). Where possible I have checked place names, and adopted current standard spellings. In a few cases historical names are amended to the current name (e.g. ‘Oslo’ not ‘Christiana’). The excellent online map of Iceland at http://kortasja.lmi.is was extremely helpful in following Döblin’s geography of Iceland and locating many place names.
The most difficult decision in preparing the English text was presented by Parts 3 and 4, which Döblin himself confessed had grown almost to form a separate novel. Here he was attempting to resolve his still ambivalent view of humans and their place in the world – to be admired as all-powerful Prometheans, or pitied as pygmies impotent against the immensity of Nature and the Cosmos? (His next two epics Manas and Berlin Alexanderplatz would continue this attempt.) In contradiction to his strongly-expressed opposition to the Personal in fiction (“nothing but swindle and lyricism”) in these two Parts he explored interpersonal and sexual relationships in the form of two triangles: Marduk-Jonathan-La Balladeuse, and Jonathan-Elina-Marduk, and sought to link the private – emotions and eroticism – on the one hand with the political and public on the other. Whatever their intrinsic merits, these lengthy explorations significantly delay the reader’s arrival at the enthralling core of the epic: the Iceland-Greenland venture. I have therefore abridged Parts 3 and 4 by completely omitting two storylines totalling about 23,000 words.
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From Norman Moonbloom:
> Dear Mr Godwin, Let me first thank you for your truly valiant attempts to bring the shamefully neglected Alfred Doblin to a wider reading public. My first encounter with Doblin was back in the early nineteen-seventies when I stumbled across the Eugene Jolas translation of Berlin Alexanderplatz in a charming little secondhand bookshop (a translation that I still prefer to the more recent translation by Michael Hofmann, although this may be be based more on sentimental reasons rather than intellectual). Nevertheless, the surprises found inside this novel were complete and unforgettable. I desperately attempted to find more works by this outstanding writer only to discover, to my dismay, that only one other novel had been translated into English. That novel was Men Without Mercy. I finally unearthed a copy of this work, at great expense, and while it may not be a genuinely great novel it is genuinely an interesting one, but then it would seem that Doblin was incapable of writing an uninteresting work. Unfortunately I was forced to wait a number of long years until John E. Woods translated A People Betrayed and Karl and Rosa, which was quickly followed by Tales of a Long Night translated by Robert and Rita Kimber. At this time I was exceedingly optimistic that this was the beginning of the resurrection of Alfred Doblin’s novels. The longed for resurrection, however, never eventuated. it was not until your translation of The Three Leaps of Wang Lung came into existence that Doblin once again seemed to be receiving the recognition he so greatly deserves. Now I discover that you have had difficulty in finding a publisher for your translations of Amazonas, Wallenstein, Mountains Seas and Giants as well as Manas. I would weep, but the fact that you have given readers the opportunity to read these wonderful works by Doblin gives me hope. I will end my praise of Mr. Godwin and Alfred Doblin on a selfish note. Having been truly absorbed by Doblin’s Wallenstein when will book four, five and six be completed, and are you thinking of translating Wadzek’s Battle with the Steam Turbine as well as The Black Curtain? Once more thank you for helping bring Alfred Doblin into the English reading world.
Norman
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