The joy of Thomas Mann’s diabolism

Throughout the flat, post-Christmas limbo I lay languishing after another dollop of chemotherapy and read my Christmas present, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, in the later Everyman translation by John E. Woods. Set alongside H.T. Lowe-Porter’s sturdier pre-war translation, the difference was more marginal than I’d been led to believe by John E. Woods’s online trumpeters, and in many cases the old workhorse H.T. Lowe-Porter’s choice of words was more graceful and economical. Or so it appeared to this particular unwashed, unshaven reader with food stains on his pyjamas, drugged up to the gills on morphine, antibiotics and Domestos, or whatever it is the nurse dripped into the tube opening in my neck. But on every page there came a word, phrase or sentence in the new translation that was as deft and incisive as a through ball by Luka Modric struck with the outside of the boot, so I stuck with that.

Thomas Mann: what a serious guy! And so far into the closet he had a grace and favour apartment at Cair Paravel. But I love that diabolical, Dionysian final 10 per cent in him. The Magic Mountain is set in a Davos sanatorium before the Great War and through his characters Herr Mann says things like: disease takes one to an ecstatic anticipation of death. And: health makes people stupid. And: all disease is caused by the libido – it’s a form of immorality. Ideal reading, then, for we ecstatic diseased.

I hope I’m not boring you?

On New Year’s Eve Catriona flew up to Bonnie Scotland for a week to visit her three grown-up daughters and brand-new darling grandchild. Although alone suddenly, my febrile, diseased consciousness wasn’t aware of any longing for the company of other human beings.