Lenz

Georg Buchner

Nov. 2004 · Archipelago

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This classic of German literature—often hailed as the inception of European modernist prose—follows the mental breakdown of an 18th-century schizophrenic playwright, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz
 
Published after Büchner’s death, Lenz provides a taut case study of three weeks in the life of schizophrenic, perhaps the first third-person text ever to be written from the “inside” of insanity. An early experiment in docufiction, Büchner’s textual montage draws on the diary of J.F. Oberlin, the Alsatian pastor who briefly took care of Lenz in 1778, while also refracting Goethe’s memoir of his troubled friendship with the playwright. English versions of both these historical source texts here accompany Lenz for the first time in this bilingual presentation. Based on the best recent edition of the text, this fresh translation will allow readers to discover why Heiner Müller pronounced Lenz the inaugural example of “21st-century prose.”
 
Georg Büchner’s visionary exploration of an 18th-century playwright’s descent into madness has been called the inception of European modernist prose. Elias Canetti considered this short novella one of the decisive reading experiences of his life, and writers as various as Paul Celan, Christa Wolff, Peter Schneider, and Gert Hofmann have paid homage to it in their works.

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At his death at the age of 24 in 1837, Georg Büchner 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 Gérard de Nerval’s Selected Writings, Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hymns and Fragments, Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary, Henri Michaux’s Emergences/ Resurgences and Stroke by Stroke, Gérard 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 Scève’s Délie was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize and the Weidenfeld Prize.