The Lord Chandos Letter | Hugo von Hofmannsthal

The Lord Chandos Letter | Hugo von Hofmannsthal | A classic, in a great translation

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The Lord Chandos L...

	The Lord Chandos Letter Hugo von Hofmannsthal NYRB Classics, 2005 - 152 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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Hugo von Hoffmannsthal made his mark as a poet, as a playwright, and as the librettist for Richard Strauss?s greatest operas, but he was no less accomplished as a writer of short, strangely evocative prose works. The atmospheric stories and sketches collected here?fin-de-siècle fairy tales from the Vienna of Klimt and Freud, a number of them never before translated into English?propel the reader into a shadowy world of uncanny fates and secret desires. An aristocrat from Paris in the plague years shares a single night of passion with an unknown woman; a cavalry sergeant meets his double on the battlefield; an orphaned man withdraws from the world with his four servants, each of whom has a mysterious power over his destiny.

The most influential of all of Hofmannsthal's writings is the title story, a fictional letter to the English philosopher Francis Bacon in which Lord Chandos explains why he is no longer able to write. The "Letter" not only symbolized Hofmannsthal's own turn away from poetry, it captured the psychological crisis of faith and language which was to define the twentieth century.

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The Epistle of Modernism

In the supreme example of High Modernist irony, Hofmannsthal eloquently explains why he can no longer communicate. He is an exemplar for Kafka, Borges, Joyce, everyone.

A classic, in a great translation

I'll just add a little to Daniel Myers's review. These stories have long been classics of modernist literature, and they should be read by everyone interested in the history of Symbolism, the heritage of Poe, the history of fantasy fiction, and the development of what Robert Musil called "daylight mysticism" (that's in his "Posthumous Papers of a Living Author," also on Amazon).

What I'd like to add to Myers is that "The Lord Chandos Letter" is a very important text in the history of modernist mistrust of words. It plays a central role in Enrique Vila-Matas's "Bartleby & Co." (also on Amazon), a novel about people who have given up writing. George Steiner has written about "The Lord Chandos Letter" in "Real Presences."

"The Lord Chandos Letter" describes the author's mistrust of all words -- he is given to personal, incommunicable, "sublime" experiences, which can be set off by all kinds of small events: a water beetle rowing across the dark surface of water in a rain barrel; rats dying on the floor of a dairy barn, writhing in the lethal atmosphere of the "sharp, sweetish-smelling" poison; "a moss-covered stone," and "all the shabby and crude objects of a rogh life." In other words, he is no longer moved by the grand, beautiful, pompous, public displays of ordinary life, but only the forgtten, mislaid, overlooked, trivial, "meaningless" things that other people fail to notice. The story is fundamentally about what might still have religious meaning -- although he calls the effect "sublime," not religious. And whatever is genuinely religious must also surpass language.

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Dreamworks

This little book is rather difficult to review, for any number of reasons, not the least of which being that what are called the "stories" herein are not really stories at all in the common sense of the word but rather haunting, oneiric vignettes which end as abruptly as they begin - To call them impressionistic would be not only an understatement, but not quite right. - All the characters limned here live in a sort of dreamworld always accompanied by that indefinable, unlocalised sense of dread and foreboding one has in a dream. Thus, sometimes it seems to come from a well, or a barrel, or a golden apple or, in two instances, an encounter with a sort of doppelganger. It's as if the author had discovered some subaqueous realm lying just under normal sense experience and described it with the acute realism of Chekhov (of whom the intense detail in the stories reminded me) combined with the inner horror that Poe expresses at his best...except Hoffmannstahl expresses it better, but he couldn't bring himself (apparently) to complete a story of the kind that Poe wrote. Rather, we have these numinous dream-sequences filled with unnamable dread. It's as if, as Gerard De Nerval wrote of himself shortly before he committed suicide, the dream world was taking over "reality" in the author's mind, or, rather, has taken over.

The "letter", tacked on to the end of these stories, supposedly explaining them, is interesting, but really doesn't tell us anything we can't glean from the stories. It's a manifesto of sorts, basically stating (and I simplify here) that language is incapable of explaining the numinous.

Hoffmannstahl was something of an expert on light, and some of his best descriptions involve the effect of the lighting that lends a scene its all-encompassing "aura". In this, he very much reminds me of Emily Dickinson. I was constantly reminded while reading of her lines:

A certain slant of light-
Winter afternoons-
Oppresses with the heft
Of cathedral tunes.

Well, I shan't go on. I'll leave the prospective reader with a quote from the narrator of "Tale of Two Couples" to give him/her and idea of what to expect:

"I walked along like someone in a dream who is being touched by the atmosphere of his life and by the suspicion that he is dreaming." P.112

This is the effect throughout the book on the reader.

Only four stars because it seems to me that Hoffmannstahl fails to give us anything but a dreamy patchwork of vignettes that lack any sort of meaning or continuity save in these oneiric, numinous flashes of dread and insight.....But, what blinding flashes they are!

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