At his death at the age of 24 in 1837, Georg B chner also left
behind Leonce and Lena, Woyzeck, and Danton's Death-bold,
psychologically, and politically acute plays that were also well
ahead of their time. His dramatic works exercised a profound
influence on Brecht and Ionesco, as well as on the composer Alban
Berg and the filmmaker Werner Herzog.
Richard Sieburth's translations include Gerard de Nerval's Selected
Writings, Friedrich H lderlin's Hymns and Fragments, Walter
Benjamin's Moscow Diary, Henri Michaux's Emergences/ Resurgences
and Stroke by Stroke, Gerard de Nerval's The Salt Smugglers, Michel
Leiris' Nights as Day, Days as Night, and Gershom Scholem's The
Fullness of Time- Poems. His edition of Nerval's Selected Writings
won the 2000 PEN/Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize. His
recent translation of Maurice Sc ve's Delie was a finalist for the
PEN Translation Prize and the Weidenfeld Prize.
“Büchner’s Lenz represents a brilliant and widely influential
prefiguring of the modernist narrative imagination. For the first
time, thanks to Richard Sieburth’s astonishing skills, we have a
version in English that respects and communicates the radical
inventiveness and stylistic singularity of the original. It is a
work that fully breathes in the present.”
—Michael Palmer
“Richard Sieburth is one of handful of magnificent literary
translators among us—witness his Hölderlin, Nerval, Scève, and
Gershom Scholem’s poems. His extraordinary rendition of Büchner’s
Lenz is both a superb version and a startling interpretation of a
great and vital work. The beautifully produced little volume is
amazingly rich, giving us Büchner’s "source’ in Oberlin, Goethe’s
reflections upon Lenz himself, and crucial commentary.”
—Harold Bloom
“Like a jewelry chest, the covers of this book open on a gem of
German prose, brought to its full radiance by Richard Sieburth’s
splendid translation, accompanied by the German original as usually
befits only poetry, and set among extensive notes and additional
texts which allow the reader to appreciate its historical
importance as well as its present powerful effect. I’d like to call
Lenz a score, a score to go mad over . . . ”
—William H. Gass
“A totemic work of German literature.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“Lenz is a writer’s cry from psychic hell, and an astounding
act of drawing from nature, where the nature in question is not
hill and dale (though the landscape is in the foreground
here), but the soul in distress.... Lenz recalibrates the
literature of its time, and in this fine translation by Richard
Sieburth, with its wealth of supporting material, it recalibrates
our literature too, reminding us how unsturdy are these sands of
the innermost self.”
—Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm
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