Lenz

Praise

“Büchner’s Lenz represents a brilliant and widely influential prefiguring of the modernist narrative imagination. For the first time, thanks to Richard Sieburth’s astonishing skills, we have a version in English that respects and communicates the radical inventiveness and stylistic singularity of the original. It is a work that fully breathes in the present.”
—Michael Palmer

“Richard Sieburth is one of handful of magnificent literary translators among us—witness his Hölderlin, Nerval, Scève, and Gershom Scholem’s poems. His extraordinary rendition of Büchner’s Lenz is both a superb version and a startling interpretation of a great and vital work. The beautifully produced little volume is amazingly rich, giving us Büchner’s “source’ in Oberlin, Goethe’s reflections upon Lenz himself, and crucial commentary.”
—Harold Bloom

“Like a jewelry chest, the covers of this book open on a gem of German prose, brought to its full radiance by Richard Sieburth’s splendid translation, accompanied by the German original as usually befits only poetry, and set among extensive notes and additional texts which allow the reader to appreciate its historical importance as well as its present powerful effect. I’d like to call Lenz a score, a score to go mad over . . . ”
—William H. Gass

“A totemic work of German literature.”
—Times Literary Supplement

“Lenz is a writer’s cry from psychic hell, and an astounding act of drawing from nature, where the nature in question is not hill and dale (though the landscape is in the foreground here), but the soul in distress…. Lenz recalibrates the literature of its time, and in this fine translation by Richard Sieburth, with its wealth of supporting material, it recalibrates our literature too, reminding us how unsturdy are these sands of the innermost self.”
—Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm