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Musil died of a stroke an hour after a morning’s work on this chapter. His wife found him collapsed in a bathtub with a smile on his face that she described as spöttisch, which could be translated as “mocking” or “ironic.” I find the second meaning more plausible.

The handwritten manuscript of “Breaths of a Summer Day,” the latest of many versions he wrote over several years (not all of them under this title), is studded with deletions and inserts and stops on a note of inconclusion. Like the great novel of which it forms a part, it is a magnificent fragment.

—JOEL AGEE

*The word translated above as “intimate kinship” is Geschwisterlichkeit. It is usually translated as “fraternity,” but the root of the German word is Schwester, meaning “sister.” In such subtle ways is Agathe prefigured—announced as it were—early on in the novel.

†Hagauer is the name of her husband.

‡The danger of falling prey to phantasmagorias is mentioned again and again, but at no point are we permitted to conclude from Ulrich and Agathe’s exchanges that they are deluded.

§It may not be insignificant, in view of Agathe’s portrayal, that a great deal of space is given in Buber’s book to the testimony of medieval Christian women.

A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

I FIRST read The Man Without Qualities sixty-one years ago, which happens to be the span of Robert Musil’s life, when I was eighteen years old and living in the part of Berlin that at the time still called itself the capital of the German Democratic Republic. I found the thick, handsomely bound volume on my stepfather’s desk, among other books published in the West that he had ordered for possible review in a literary magazine he edited. I asked his permission to read it. I couldn’t have understood much of the book, but I read it with tremendous excitement. I think what bowled me over at first was its sheer stylistic brilliance and wit and the way even the more foolish characters spoke like philosophers and sometimes like poets. But the true entrancement set in with Agathe’s arrival. I had never read anything that could compare for sheer erotic charm with the exquisite balance of forbiddenness and enticement that developed between this brother and sister. And there was something else for which I had no preparation. It was the news (I took it to be news, not an artifice of fiction) of a mystical state that had nothing to do with the worlds of politics and culture that surrounded me, and that bestowed on those lucky souls who discovered it a fulfillment of happiness and love that was unmatched by anything in ordinary experience. I believed in this “other condition” and was convinced that I already had intimations of it. It was of course Musil’s prose that made me believe it.

Being invited to translate precisely those late chapters from The Man Without Qualities was a surprising and welcome gift. It was an opportunity to reacquaint myself with a work and an author that had shaped my own vocation as a writer like probably no other. The reacquaintance proved, in some important respects, to be a discovery. The enchantment I had experienced as a boy was no doubt due to my own receptive capacity, but on the other end, so to speak, was a versatility and subtlety of language I was not experienced enough as a reader to fully appreciate.