The sheer brio of Döblin’s prose, together with the unstoppable forward momentum of his narrative, makes all this squalor not only bearable but riveting. The story comes at you in a flood of words: Each character’s stream of consciousness is just one tributary in an enormous torrent that also includes newspaper headlines, advertising jingles, weather reports, political slogans, and seemingly every other kind of verbal and aural flotsam that would have been bobbing around Berlin in the years 1927–28, when the novel is set ... That it all flows as naturally as it does in English is a testament to Michael Hofmann’s resourcefulness ... he becomes a kind of one-man band, tossing off rhymes, doggerel, and what feels like several decades’ worth of low-down slang to recreate the working-class patois of Döblin’s interwar Berlin ... This is one modernist monument that nobody should have trouble finishing.
Michael Hofmann’s new translation now promises to awaken readers to the relevance of Berlin Alexanderplatz as an urgent, raw account of modernity ... Hofmann’s accomplishment is to reimagine in English how the novel talks, squawks, screeches, and curses in Döblin’s German. The original is a gabby thing, and Hofmann too makes his translation talk in many voices ... The language remains impressively taut and sharp throughout ... Hofmann brilliantly creates a linguistic force field that captures the spirit and inflection of the original, choosing a word here and an expression there that slowly build the sense of a close-knit, grimy, grotesque world ... We come away having tasted that heart, and all the strange, succulent marrow of Döblin’s epic.
The scandalous, almost futurist velocity of Berlin Alexanderplatz undoubtedly contributes to its appeal. But while the book is funny, shockingly violent, absurd, strangely tender and memorably peopled, its lasting resonance lies not in its hulking antihero or picaresque narrative beats but rather in its collage-like depiction of the city ... Luckily for readers, new and returning, Hofmann’s rhythmically pliable language renders a Berlin no less operatic for all its sordidness ... For the contemporary reader, alert to the churning of Trump-stoked resentment and the rising of the far right worldwide, Berlin Alexanderplatz may prove a kind of cracked mirror. Döblin acts as both poet and prophet, though one wishes him only the well-deserved stature of the former.
Berlin Alexanderplatz is a lumbering leviathan, all rough edges, and the translator’s challenge is to master its crude, prodigious energies. There are many passages in Mr. Hofmann’s translation that I do not like, but few that I can truly call wrong. The translator has instincts all his own, and it’s a good thing, too. His excesses are appropriate to Döblin’s own. Even attempting to translate Berlin Alexanderplatz took something whose vocabulary seems increasingly antiquated to us: gusto, chutzpah, guts ... Now we have another chance in English to contemplate the largeness of Franz’s small fate. Döblin made a world, and the point of a good translation is to let us begin to understand what it all means.
It was long branded untranslatable, a view reinforced by a turgid rendering published in 1931. Yet a fluent, pacy new translation by Michael Hofmann gainsays that assumption, opening up the book for English-speakers. And with it the city ... Western societies—changing, hypocritical, anti-political—are not about to follow Weimar Germany’s trajectory. But elements of Berlin Alexanderplatz still echo.
Look, any honest estimation of the new translation, by Michael Hofmann, of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz from NYRB Classics is bound to begin with duteous piety, lauding it, since it is a one-and-done masterpiece that’s basically impossible to oversell, as (why not) the single biggest event in publishing in a lifetime, a crucial refurbishment of something English-language readers have been missing out on for a century, and a long-missing piece of Modernism’s ponderous jigsaw. All of which is the case of course.
To lodge in its pages is to dwell at the convergence of so many images and references (e.g., biblical riffs; scientific facts; news snippets; weather, economic, and agricultural reports) as to make the thought of retaining but a smattering of its wealth doubtful after a first encounter ... Broadly speaking, Döblin — who was born Jewish but later converted to a Catholicism — accomplishes two major feats in his novel. First, he captures the frenetic, Teutonic energy that arose in the aftermath of World I before the Nazis took power ... The second overarching accomplishment of the novel is moral. In telling the story of Franz Biberkopf, the book’s central character, Döblin indicts the societal forces driving Germany to the precipice ... Döblin’s warning in the novel...'There’s idiocy in the air, there’s hypnotism in the air, it’s in the air, it’s in the air, and it’s staying there.' Who, in 2018, can’t relate to that?
...a brutal and prophetic novel, with great literary merit and historical fascination too ... Dialogue is the most difficult thing to get right in translation and Hofmann has opted to render the speech of working-class Berliners in cockney dialect. It reads fluently, even at the risk of being possibly obscure to a non-British audience ... Berlin Alexanderplatz is a turning point in the history of the German novel, departing from a more traditional narrative structure. When the Nazis came to power, Döblin fled to Paris and thence to the US. He suffered ill health and obscurity thereafter — one more victim of a regime unparalleled in philistinism as well as barbarism.
...an impressively wild and fearless new translation of the book ... Berlin Alexanderplatz transcends its genre elements, largely because of Döblin’s deep lack of hope about what can be expected of human beings ... It is the language of modern urban life that is being blown up and rebuilt in these pages ... Franz reflects in the novel’s final pages. 'The words come rolling towards you, you need to watch yourself, see that they don’t run you over.' And that may be the best definition of Berlin Alexanderplatz: Döblin’s transcription of what it sounds like to be run over by words.
The great successes of the novel really come from its embrace of formal experimentation, when that technique of montage cuts the reader away from the narrative and characters it has placed at its center and shows us the briefest moments of a helplessly entangled world. These little scenes showcase Döblin’s ability to elucidate the fine details of individual desperation meeting with cosmic cruelty.
NYRB Classics has rescued Döblin’s masterpiece from oblivion ... Hofmann’s solution is to make these residents of 1920s Berlin Into cockneys, to transpose Alexanderplatz to Whitechapel. In doing so, he denatures the novel completely: at no point did I feel I was reading a German classic. In a book totally dependent on its site-specific language, moving its setting and characters lock, stock, and barrel to another country is one solution to this problem in translation, but it’s a bad one ... What we have here is aBerlin Alexanderplatz. What we are still waiting for is theBerlin Alexanderplatz.
American readers will have to adjust their ears to the translation’s frequent use of Cockney ('Well, who’d’you fink, the fat girl, coz I had no goods left on me'), but Hofmann’s version is vigorous and fresh, bringing Döblin to a new generation of readers. A welcome refurbishing of a masterpiece of literary modernism, one of the most significant German novels of the 20th century.
Hoffman’s translation moves seamlessly from the personal to the societal and back again, using Anglicisms ('Not if what I want’s the silk coat, innit?') that are sometimes jarring ...This is a damning portrait of violence both personal and societal, with a sense of something terrible on the horizon.
