Promotional Information

Translated into English for the first time, a collection of scandalous and humorous wit from Vienna's answer to Oscar Wilde, Karl Kraus used aphorisms as part of his running commentary on the ferment of his own culture.

About the Author

Karl Kraus (1874-1936) was the editor of and chief contributor to the journal Die Fackel and the author of several works for the stage, including The Last Days of Mankind.Jonathan McVity, a partner with Twentieth Century Art and Antiques in Charlottesville, Virginia, holds a bachelors degree in English from Oxford University.
 

Reviews

"McVity's volume is ... important both as translation and as evidence that Kraus can be translated... Others ... have tried their hand at translating the aphorisms, but McVity is the most ambitious... McVity masterfully preserves the flavor, spirit, meaning, and intent of the original." -- Choice "McVity takes the refreshing view that translation is an opportunity rather than an impossibility, and he has some wonderfully inventive equivalents for Kraus's wordplay." -- Michael Wood, London Review of Books "These 9l8 aphorisms, courageously translated by John McVity, reveal Kraus in all his truculent, rebarbative, crap-cutting glory. Like postcards lost in the dead-letter office for the better part of a century, they call up a world no longer our own and yet manage to speak with surprising frequency to many of our most abiding concerns." - Martin Jay, author of Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time "McVity has done the seemingly impossible: translate the complex and quirky wisdoms of one of the greatest twentieth-century masters of the German language into an English that is not only coherent but lets the brilliance of the original shine through." - Fred Viebahn, University of Virginia "The volume includes, for the first time in English, the entire text of Kraus's first book of aphorisms... For all of Kraus's political intricacies, 'the most painful part' of translating his work into modern English ... is capturing his ingenious and assiduous wordplay." -- Aaron Retica, Lingua Franca.