There exists a theory according to which, in fiction, particularities of language are not crucial, so that if one has read Dostoyevsky in translation, one can legitimately say that one has read Dostoyevsky; whereas the equivalent cannot be said if one has read Pushkin in translation, the reason being that the language of poetry entails rhythm and metaphor and other tropes of poetic diction that are not easy to carry across into another language. This theory may have merit in a general way, but it makes rather short shrift of prose fiction as a form of poetry, and it certainly does not apply to a novelist like Musil, who so clearly requires and rewards close attention not only to what he says but to how he says it. I can’t think of another way to do justice to this immensely resourceful stylist than to attend to both the literal and the figural meanings of his words, and to strive to re-create in English the shape, the rhythm, the web of associations and implications, the nuances of irony, the lyricism, the architectural equilibrium, the pleasures to the ear as well as the mind in the composition of any sentence he wrote. There is also at times a strange newness of meaning—to borrow the philosopher Owen Barfield’s prime criterion for poetic beauty—that startles not only the English but also the German reader in Musil’s prose. With it, inevitably, comes some oddness in expression. Musil hardly ever employs a common turn of phrase, for instance, without varying it in a subtle and unexpected way. It is a temptation for a translator to mitigate strangeness in the original with something more familiar. In my view, this temptation must be resisted.

Such criteria unavoidably impose on the translator of Musil strictures and anxieties not dissimilar to those that tormented the notoriously self-exacting author. Again and again, as my work progressed, and despite a comfortable deadline, little zephyrs of unease beset me: Could this or that detail not have been rendered more accurately, or more aptly? At one point, to choose one of many examples, Ulrich says to his sister: “Das Verstehen macht einem unstillbaren Staunen Platz.” The adjective unstillbar, derived from the verb stillen, which denotes the settling of a baby’s distress or hunger by suckling, here forms an alliterative unit with its noun, Staunen. That word presented me with a first puzzle: Was it “amazement” or “astonishment,” or was it “wonder”? Feeling out the gradations of meaning in those three words, and comparing them with the vibration of Staunen in the passage in which the sentence appears, I chose “astonishment.” For unstillbar, “unquenchable,” “insatiable,” and “unappeasable” offered themselves, but they all implied a voraciousness or greed that I didn’t hear in the German word with its infantine connotation. I settled, uncomfortably, for “ceaseless astonishment.” Months later, after a Google search for unstillbar in a variety of contexts, I saw that I had been mistaken: a hungry baby is indeed voracious, and unstillbar is very adequately translated as “unquenchable.” I mentioned this to a friend, who suggested “unslakable” as an alternative: “After all,” he said, “doesn’t a mother slake her baby’s thirst rather than quench it?” And so, in the end, “Understanding gives way to unslakable aston­ishment,” odd as it sounds, seemed the best possible translation for the equally odd combination of words in Musil’s sentence.