The Death of Virgil - Difficulty vs Readability

Today we look at the famously complex, Modernist masterpiece 'The Death of Virgil' by Hermann Broch and ask the question: at what point does the difficulty of art diminish its value. Enjoy!
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[@AgrippaPetronius1903]

Oh my gif, finally someone who has grasped what a literary genius broch was, the best way to receive this masterpieces is to have someone you love read it to you...it’s a symphony equal to anything Chopin Bach or Mozart have produced, “ the true value of life is had in one act of spontaneously kindness “

[@gwynettsiriban3470]

I still kept thinking about the day I stumbled upon this literary gold here at our local bookstore amongst the cheaply priced. That day I didn't understood its value, went and bought it anyways cause it was cheap. But as I read it. I found myself in awe. It's like I didn't found the book but the other way around. The book found me

[@am8455]

I discovered your channel half an hour ago and I must sad I love your video essays. I am looking forward to seeing more of your content.

[@marcelom7880]

Great video. The death of Virgil is one of the best books I ever read. My favorite parts are the three drunks episode and the dialogue with Caesar. But all that dreams and the epic final scene are great too! So many issues. Actually I'm writing an article about it. Thank you for this video.

[@oleghrozman4172]

Today i have bought this book, i will try to read it very soon. If you like very difficult, weird, strange and complicated books, you should try to read "River without shores" (trilogy) writen by german writer/dramaturge Hans Henny Jahnn. Also you can try books of Alfred Doblin, John Fowles, etc.

[@frankmorlock9134]

I just came across your channel and I liked your review of Broch whose works I've had for many years but never got around to reading. As a general proposition I agree with you that a writer should write and express himself in the way he chooses, I do have some reservations. If you are writing a work of any kind you are trying to communicate your ideas, and I firmly believe you should try your best to make yourself understood. And that means giving it as much clarity as you can. If, after having done the best you can do the idea is still difficult well so be it. There are difficult ideas to express. But that is different from concealing or obfuscating ideas to make them seem more important than they are. Unfortunately some writers do just that.

[@themeanderinghero4279]

Another excellent video, my man. Keep it up. I'm halfway through Voss on your recommendation. I'll let you know what I think when I get to the end.

[@outofthepage]

Well I hope it lives up to the unrealistically high level of praise I gave it!

[@MalcolmKelly72]

Great review on one of the great novels. Delighted this novel is getting some exposure. It is a difficult novel to read, but I found it had an hypnotic prose that compelled me to keep reading. And yes, the final chapter is absolutely sublime.

[@robert0price]

I read the book on my channel!

[@bradfordmccormick9501]

I was a friend of Hermann Broch's son, H.F. Broch de Rothermann, in his last years. He said the translation of "The Sleepwalkers" was good but the translation of "The Virgil" was not good. He said this to me when I said to him I thought "not yet here but yet at hand" was not worthy of his father, but that I thought it should be "not yet and yet already", and he replied I was right and JSU's translation was not good. I read "The Death of Virgil maybe 40 years ago. I plan to go back to it before I die, Covid and other things permitting. I'm thinking of trying to bumble through translating the first couple paragraphs and the last couple of pages myself (I know very little German). I found "The Sleepwalkers" much easier reading, and a lot more fun (item: Godicke who is brought back from the dead by a bet of a couple packs of cigarettes, and tells a lay person reading about Lazarus at a prayer meeting that only those who have risen from the dead have a right to speak on that subject). To conclude here, Broch's son once told me that it was unfortunate that his father invested much time in the United Nations because other persons could have done that but nobody else could write the books that consequently went unwritten, and also that it was a good thing his father did not know me, either, because: "he would have wasted a lot of time on you." As for the beginning of The Virgil: "Steel blue and light...." I have seen two, thousand year old National Treasure swords in the Kyoto National Museum (Japan) where what I call "the waves in the steel" would be a worthy illustration for that sentence of Broch's.

[@outofthepage]

Very interesting, thank you for sharing! I've always wondered if many newer translaters have been put off the prospect because JSU and Broch worked so closely on the original. I suppose time will tell!

[@bradfordmccormick9501]

@@outofthepage I have no idea about any relation between Broch and JSU or who JSU was. Etnestine Schlant Bradley wrote a very nice little book on Broch (curious the wife of a big basketball star would be a Broch scholar, IMO). I also came across something recently that has me stumped. Of all places on the Walmart website I found a book of Broch's correspondence with his son "Armand" who was apparently a piece of F. Scott Fitzgerald fast cars and fast living waste. The book looked real. I never heard of any "Armand", and I never heard that "Pitz" (former OSS officer) had been a waste in his earlier years. "Pitz" and Julia Child, maybe, but not "Pitz" and maybe a Bugatti, unless he never wanted to spoil my fantasies about him. And where would "Armand" have got that kind of money to throw away? One more Story about the son: I wanted to go to Architecture school (1982). He wrote a recommendation for me for Princeton pointing out that his father had lived in Albert Einstein's house. It didn''t work. On the other hand, this 80 year old European aristocrat (who lived in a small 1 bedroom apt in New York's upper east side with his wife) also drew a design of a tree house for me, so I got an old gentleman to play like a kid for once. I liked that.

[@bradfordmccormick2811]

@@johnmulligan455I did not ask for specifics about why the translation of "the Virgil" was not in the son's judgment good. I was "happy" to hear I had intuitively spotted an important bad thing in the translation. But Broch's son (who was a simultaneous translator and translated some of his father's books into English, including "the mountain novel") very clearly and succinctly stated to me his opinion about the two translations. The point about the U.N. clearly was that where we got 2 (3?) novels, we could/should have got more. ~ Very strange thing [to me, at least] I did not have a few bucks to waste on: On the Walmart website a book was for sale which looked to me genuine, of some letters between Broch (pere) and his dissolute son in the 1920's. Something did not add up for me: either the book was a fraud, or there was some second "son" or else the man I knew had a youth he never said anything about to me, or what? I thought the son was an OSS officer during WWII and that made sense to me, but not that in his youth he would have got off on fast cars and fast living. When I knew him he did not own any automobile (he occasionally Avis/Hertz-style rented one for a couple days to go somewhere) and he and his wife were, to say the least, "reserved", living in a 1 bedroom apartment in a nondescript building on the New York City "Upper East Side" where the kitchen was so small a slender person could hardly squeeze into it. Personal story: He once stiffed me for a dinner bill, and since he was an old man probably already dying from pernicious anemia, I found it kind of endearing if it made him a bit happy.

[@miguilim1]

Very very interesting (from Italy).👍

[@bradfordmccormick9501]

Italy? Broch's son was interested that, in Antonioni's film La Notte, Monica Vitti is reading The Sleepwalkers. I think he liked this, and I like it also. (I wish I had been either Broch or Antonioni or Ms. Vitti, but that is not how fate had it....)

[@thedeverauxdaily8548]

Haha this is not a Sanders sides video-