I said earlier that Hermann Broch's The
Death of Virgil is a difficult and ambitious book. In the appendices to my German edition, the author discusses his work at length at various stages and revisions. He worked on it for seven years, from 1938 to 1945.
There is a brief description of the novel (or poem as the author insists it is) at Wikipedia (as usual, handle with care). English readers will have the comfort to know that the translation by Jean Starr Untermeyer, a friend of Broch's, was closely supervised by the author. He himself also addressed the difficulty of translating this work in the above appendices.
The New York Times calls it A Rhapsodical Prose Poem. The New York Review of Books (subscription required) has Uttering the Unutterable, with a rather critical view of the writing technique:
"The Death of Virgil (1945) constitutes a marked advance, or prolongation [over The Sleepwalkers], in the direction indicated by the philosophizing parts of the earlier work, though with this difference: that the reflections of the dying Virgil, while equally abstract, are largely unargued, they proceed less by logic than by what alas is called "poetry," sometimes reminding us of Thus Spake Zarathustra, but rarefied, diluted, and inflated, lacking in pointedness and in Nietzsche's dubious yet undoubted excitement.
But as one having grown up with the specific German/Austrian Modernist literary tradition, that aspect does not bother me that much. My problem here is reading concentration, as large parts of the novel/poem are written without paragraph indentation. Maybe on may vacation this summer, where I often am all by myself between concerts . . .
On JSTOR, unfortunately user-restricted, I found this 30-page discussion:
Broch's Death of Vergil: Program Notes
Author(s): Hermann J. Weigand
Source: PMLA, Vol. 62, No. 2, (Jun., 1947), pp. 525-554
Published by: Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/459277
It is interesting that the reviewer writes:
"That I have not altogether succumbed to the spell of this book may be gathered from this introduction. I account for this partly because I shrink from abandoning myself to its shattering cosmic violence; in part, however, I find myself rebelling against a certain feature of its hypnotizing magic, of which I shall speak at once, and out of turn, simply because there will be no time to return to this later."
Another review:
Review: The Death of the World
Author(s): Otto von Simson
Reviewed work(s): The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch
Source: The Review of Politics, Vol. 8, No. 2, (Apr., 1946), pp. 258-260
Published by: Cambridge University Press for the University of Notre Dame du lac on behalf of Review of Politics
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1403989
