{"product_id":"joseph-and-his-brothers-isbn-9781400040018","title":"Joseph and His Brothers","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis remarkable new translation of the Nobel Prize-winner’s great masterpiece is a major literary event.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThomas Mann regarded his monumental retelling of the biblical story of Joseph as his magnum opus. He conceived of the four parts–The Stories of Jacob, Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt, and Joseph the Provider–as a unified narrative, a “mythological novel” of Joseph’s fall into slavery and his rise to be lord over Egypt. Deploying lavish, persuasive detail, Mann conjures for us the world of patriarchs and pharaohs, the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Palestine, and the universal force of human love in all its beauty, desperation, absurdity, and pain. The result is a brilliant amalgam of humor, emotion, psychological insight, and epic grandeur.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNow the award-winning translator John E. Woods gives us a definitive new English version of \u003ci\u003eJoseph and His Brothers\u003c\/i\u003e that is worthy of Mann’s achievement, revealing the novel’s exuberant polyphony of ancient and modern voices, a rich music that is by turns elegant, coarse, and sublime.\u003c\/p\u003e“This excellent new translation by John E. Woods is a cause for celebration: first, because \u003ci\u003eJoseph and His Brothers\u003c\/i\u003e is in fact a great novel that will now be discovered by a new generation of readers; and second, because Woods himself is to be credited with an extraordinary achievement . . . Woods tackles the challenges of Mann’s wide-ranging diction with exuberance . . . Mann has finally found his ideal English translator.” –\u003ci\u003eNew Republic\u003c\/i\u003e,\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eRuth FranklinThomas Mann was born in 1875 in Germany. He was only twenty-five when his first novel, \u003ci\u003eBuddenbrooks\u003c\/i\u003e, was published. In 1924 \u003ci\u003eThe Magic Mountain\u003c\/i\u003e was published, and, five years later, Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Following the rise of the Nazis to power, he left Germany for good in 1933 to live in Switzerland and then in California, where he wrote \u003ci\u003eDoctor Faustus\u003c\/i\u003e (first published in the United States in 1948). Thomas Mann died in 1955.\u003cp\u003eIntroduction\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBetween 1926 and 1942, Thomas Mann labored off and on for a total of ten years at  what he called his “pyramid,” \u003ci\u003eJoseph and His Brothers, \u003c\/i\u003ethe great literary monument  that he hoped would tower over all the other works for which he is now remembered.  It is half a century now since Mann’s death, and although \u003ci\u003eThe Magic Mountain, Doctor  Faustus, \u003c\/i\u003e“Death in Venice,” and \u003ci\u003eBuddenbrooks \u003c\/i\u003estill find their readers, a mere five  decades have apparently sufficed to raze the pyramid of \u003ci\u003eJoseph, \u003c\/i\u003eleaving few traces  of what Mann intended as his magnum opus.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhy? For starters, there is the book’s  publishing history– Germany’s history. The first volume, \u003ci\u003eThe Stories of Jacob, \u003c\/i\u003eappeared  in October 1933. The Nazis had spent their first nine months tightening the terror,  Thomas Mann and his family were already in exile, and\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ethere were few who dared express  open approval of the book. Despite mounting difficulties, S. Fischer Verlag managed  to publish a small edition of volume 2, \u003ci\u003eYoung Joseph, \u003c\/i\u003ein April of the following year.  By 1936, however, S. Fischer had already been forced to move to Vienna, where \u003ci\u003eJoseph  in Egypt \u003c\/i\u003ewas published. The Nazis allowed the work to be sold inside the Reich, but  permitted no reviews and engaged in bureaucratic chicaneries to make sure it did  not sell. \u003ci\u003eJoseph the Provider \u003c\/i\u003eappeared, then, in neutral Stockholm, in 1943. After  the war, modest editions were offered once or twice a decade, the first in 1948,  but the work never recovered from its shaky early years.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe sheer bulk of the thing  surely worked against it as well: four formidable volumes, a veritable encyclopedia  of ancient Near Eastern myth, history, theology, and cultural anthropology–and all  just to retell a (once) familiar Bible story? And who in postwar Germany would read  it? Many Christians found it heterodox to the point of heresy; any Jewish readership  had been largely exterminated in the death camps. Communists in the East had no use  for a “religious” Thomas Mann. Intellectuals in the West were not particularly keen  on “biblical” novels, either. Besides, in 1947 Mann’s \u003ci\u003eDoctor Faustus \u003c\/i\u003ehad become the  focus of interest for Mann’s readers. It spoke directly to the evil that had befallen  Germany and the world. \u003ci\u003eJoseph \u003c\/i\u003eseemed more remote than ever.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOn this side of the  Atlantic, the book’s reception, if seldom enthusiastic, was somewhat warmer–Mann  was living, after all, among us as the representative of the “good Germany,” and  volume 4, \u003ci\u003eJoseph the Provider, \u003c\/i\u003ewas written under the California sun. A single-volume  edition incorporating all four novels was first published in 1948 and remained in  print into the 1990s. But over the years, the larger American reading public, accustomed  to historical biblical novels in the \u003ci\u003eBen-Hur \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eSilver Chalice \u003c\/i\u003emode, has quite understandably  viewed \u003ci\u003eJoseph \u003c\/i\u003eas forbiddingly Germanic. And more intrepid readers, who find an intellectual  home in \u003ci\u003eThe Magic Mountain \u003c\/i\u003eor \u003ci\u003eDoctor Faustus, \u003c\/i\u003ehave been just as reluctant as their  European counterparts to embrace a work that seems so far removed from the concerns  of our time. Beyond the issue of subject matter, there is another difficulty. However  unfairly, Americans have tended to think of Mann as a writer of turgid and dense,  if not almost unreadable prose. And here are almost fifteen hundred pages that, in  Helen Lowe-Porter’s translation, can often read rather like the King James Bible  run amok–replete with “he saith” and “thou knowest.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eJoseph and His Brothers \u003c\/i\u003edeserves  a far better fate. It is, by my lights, an epic comedy of extraordinary grandeur.  If Thomas Mann regarded it as his magnum opus, that was in part because he wrote \u003ci\u003eJoseph \u003c\/i\u003eas a master craftsman at the height of his powers. He knew it to be, he said,  a work of “quality.” Here is a vast canvas of mythic sweep, dark beauty, and historical  complexity, and Mann applies each stroke with incomparable skill–with a sovereignty  revealed most especially in the work’s humanity and, yes, its humor.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd yet the  question remains how best should a reader approach a work so monumental and complex–plunge  in at page _ and devil take the hindmost? That is, after all, the way Mann wrote  it to be read. With considerable trepidation, I would like to suggest a different  strategy for first-time readers of this great novel. I propose you start with “The  Story of Dinah,” part 3 of \u003ci\u003eThe Stories of Jacob\u003c\/i\u003e. Based on a Bible story (Genesis  33:17-35:5) never taught in the Sunday schools of my youth, this tale of passion  and revenge becomes, in Mann’s hand, a marvelous epitome of the virtues of the novel  as a whole. My hope, and my guess, is that you will be irrevocably caught up in this  great literary adventure and eager to climb the “pyramid.” But beware: don’t begin  at the beginning even yet. For those just getting their climbing legs in shape, “Prelude:  Descent into Hell” may well turn out to be literally that. This opening chapter’s  larger historical and theological perspectives introduce many of the themes that  Mann will weave into his four novels, but without a story to hang them on, you may  well feel he has pushed you over the edge and down a well that is indeed bottomless.  So, “Dinah” first, then back to part 1, “At the Well”–and at some point, halfway  up volume _ or so, you will want to look back, and give the Prelude its due, for  it has monumental rewards. If I read it right, Mann has woven his own Gnostic myth  here in order to show not only myth’s mystery, grandeur, and ineffability, but also  its ultimate fragility, even untrustworthiness– not unlike the story of Joseph he  is about to tell. One more hint: take time to reacquaint (or acquaint) yourself with  Genesis, reading it a chapter or two at a time in step with the story as Mann tells  it. This will enhance one of the special pleasures of \u003ci\u003eJoseph and His Brothers: \u003c\/i\u003ewatching  as Thomas Mann deftly reshapes one people’s account of its beginnings and its faith  in its God, turning that ancient text into richly detailed stories about splendidly  vivid characters, each a manifestation of Mann’s faith in our common humanity.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd  now a word about something no translator should explicitly talk to readers about–translation.  The craft should speak for itself, but perhaps a footnote is in order here. This  is only the second translation of \u003ci\u003eJoseph \u003c\/i\u003einto English, and for those familiar with  the previous one, it will come as something of a surprise. There is precious little  “biblical” language here, but instead, or so I hope, a rich polyphony of voices,  ancient and modern–for that is what Mann himself said he was trying to achieve. He  almost never quotes Luther’s translation of the Bible verbatim; instead he tinkers  with it, teasing out its images and heightening its effects for his own purposes.  In translating \u003ci\u003eJoseph, \u003c\/i\u003eHelen Lowe-Porter often chose to limit herself, and Mann,  to a diction modeled on the King James Bible–perhaps the only choice she thought  possible at a time when that version was still the language in which English-speaking  people imagined a biblical narrative had to be told. But it is not Mann’s language.  The voice of \u003ci\u003eJoseph \u003c\/i\u003eis an exuberant hodgepodge, happily at home with both anachronisms  and archaisms, now elegantly sublime, now comically coarse. And always, there is  the prose of Thomas Mann, flowing in grand periods of thought, each resembling nothing  so much as a movement in a Mozart sonata, with themes and counterthemes unfolding  in vivid conversation. I hope I have been able to provide some echo of that music  in this translation.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eJoseph and His Brothers \u003c\/i\u003eis a novel of innumerable, complex  delights, and yet there are also passages here–and who more than the translator should  know this–that seem to defy many readers’ sensibilities of what a novel should be.  At times Mann’s novel simply stops and ponders. Mann–or at least this is my suspicion–wanted  to make sure he had readers worthy of him. As a result, some passages resemble nothing  so much as a  pyramid hulking in the desert–do take time to contemplate the riddles.  And then, within a page or two, you are sure to be swept up again in Mann’s grand  narrative, in our common human enterprise told as the story of Jacob, Esau, Laban,  Leah, Rachel, Eliezer, Re’uben, Judah, Tamar, Benjamin, Montkaw, Peteprê, Mut-em-enet,  Mai-Sakhme, Ikhnatôn–and Joseph. Thomas Mann calls this epic comedy “God’s invention”–by  which, of course, he also immodestly imputes a certain divinity to its human coinventor.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Everyman's Library","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303141396709,"sku":"NP9781400040018","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400040018.jpg?v=1767730469","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/joseph-and-his-brothers-isbn-9781400040018","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}