Several excellent translators have previously applied their skill and imagination to translating all but two of the chapters included in this volume: Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser in the first English-language edition of The Man Without Qualities in 1953 (which comprised only the chapters published during Musil’s lifetime), and Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike in the 1996 edition by Alfred A. Knopf. It would be disingenuous not to acknowledge the advantage to me, as their successor, of being able to consult their approaches to some difficult problems—not to crib them but to sharpen, by their relative success at or distance from ideal fidelity, my perception of the ­challenge posed by the German text. In a few instances, when there sprang out at me from their pages an ingenious and, it seemed, irreplaceable solution, rather than settle for something less felicitous, I adopted theirs and acknowledged it in an endnote.

—J.A.

EDITORIAL NOTE

ROBERT Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is, notoriously, unfinished. Unlike that other seminal masterpiece of the first half of the twentieth century, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, there is no climactic passage that satisfies the reader by making sense of all that has come before. In fact, it is quite unclear what an ending might have looked like, and Musil had different thoughts at various stages of the book’s genesis without clearly settling on an answer. Thousands of pages of manuscript exist from different periods of the book’s composition, including chapters that Musil was working on when he died unexpectedly in 1942. The publishing history of these drafts is complex both in German and in English, and many English-speaking readers do not explore beyond the chapters that had been published in Musil’s lifetime.

Some two-thirds into the published chapters of The Man Without Qualities, the focus of the book changes with the arrival of Agathe, the sister of Ulrich, the man without qualities. As George Steiner writes in his essay “The Unfinished” (from The New Yorker, April 17, 1995), “what was previously a kaleidoscope narrows to a laser.” In both the published chapters and their continuation, which he was working on when he died, Musil changes his emphasis from the political and social satire that dominates the book until that point and turns the novel’s philosophical inquiry into the search for a viable way to “be” in a modern world where the available modes of existence have lost their value. Musil explores what it is to lead an authentic life, even if that means contravening social norms. This exploration has an explicitly mystical character. It is shown through the burgeoning ­relationship between brother and sister, who withdraw from society and engage in a series of dialogues that they themselves conceive of as a spiritual experiment.

Agathe consists of a selection of these chapters, two of which have not previously appeared in English. Together they stand as a remarkable exploration of the human condition by one of the greatest of twentieth-century writers.

On the Selection

Two sections of The Man Without Qualities were published in Musil’s lifetime, in 1930 and 1933, and he was still working on the novel when he died nearly a decade later. In 1938, he had withdrawn from publication a set of chapters that had been set up by the printers in galley proof as a continuation of the chapters published in 1933; these were the sections of the novel he was revising when he died. In addition over the years he left many thousands of pages of manuscript presenting alternative versions of the novel’s key plots. In German, a number of different editorial approaches have been taken to these drafts, starting with Martha Musil’s publication of 1943. It was not until the comprehensive Klagenfurter Ausgabe (Klagenfurt Edition, CD/online) of Musil’s complete works that transcriptions of all of his manuscript workings were made readily available.^*