Joseph and His Brothers Read online

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  JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS

  CONTENTS

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  Part Six

  YOUNGJOSEPH THOTH

  Part Seven

  THE MUTILATION

  Jacob Mourns for Joseph

  JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  THE MAN OF BLESSING

  Joseph as Reader and Personal Servant

  CONTENTS

  Joseph Grows As If Beside a Spring

  Amun Looks Askance at Joseph

  Beknechons

  Joseph Visibly Becomes an Egyptian

  Account of Mont-kaw's Modest Death

  Part Six THE SMITTEN WOMAN

  A Misinterpretation Eyes Are Opened Husband and Wife Three Exchanges The Coils of Agony The First Year The Second Year Joseph's Chastity

  Part Seven THE PIT Billets-doux The Painful Tongue

  (A Play with Epilogue) Dudu's Accusation The Threat A Gathering of Ladies The Bitch New Year's Day The Empty House The Countenance of the Father The Judgment

  JOSEPH THE PROVIDER

  Prelude in Higher Echelons

  Part One THE SECOND PIT

  Joseph Recognizes His Tears The Warden of the Prison Of Goodness and Cleverness The Gendemen The Sting of the Serpent Joseph Assists as an Interpreter

  Part Two THE SUMMONS Neb-nef-nezem

  JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS

  The Courier Light and Darkness Pharaoh's Dreams

  Part Three THE CRETAN LOGGIA

  The Introduction

  The Child of the Cave

  Pharaoh Prophesies

  "I Do Not BeUeve in It"

  All Too Blissful

  The Wise and Discreet Man

  Part Four THE TIME OF PERMISSIONS AND LIBERTIES

  Seven or Five The Golden Ceremony The Sunken Treasure Lord over Egypt Urim and Thummim The Maiden Joseph Marries Clouds Gather

  Part Five TAMAR

  The Fourth Son

  Ashtaroth

  Tamar Learns About the World

  A Resolute Woman

  "Not Through Us!"

  The Sheepshearing

  Part Six THE HOLY GAME

  Of Water and Waters Joseph Enjoys Life "They Are Coming!" The Interrogation "It Is Required!" The Money in the Sacks Less Than Full Number Jacob Wresdes at the Jabbok The Silver Cup The Fragrance of Myrtle; or, The Meal with the Brothers

  "15 1119 1128

  CONTExNTS

  The Imprisoned Cry

  It's with Benjamin!

  "It Is I!"

  "Do Not Quarrel!"

  Pharaoh Writes to Joseph

  How Do We Begin?

  Annunciation

  Part Seven RESTORATION

  I Will Go and See Him

  Seventy in All

  "Carry Him!"

  Jacob Teaches and Dreams

  Love That Must Deny

  The Reception

  Jacob Stands Before Pharaoh

  The Rascal Serv^ant

  Obedience

  Ephraim and Manasseh

  Assembled for Death

  They Now Wrap Jacob

  The Grand Procession

  1360 1364 1369 1378 1382 1388 1391

  1406 1410

  1413 1416

  1419 1428

  1431 1438

  1447 1455 1462 1478 1485

  INTRODUCTION

  Between 1926 and 1942, Thomas Mann labored off and on for a total of ten years at what he called his "pyramid," Joseph and His Brothers, the great literary monument that he hoped would tower over all the other works for which he is now remembered. It is half a century now since Mann's death, and although The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus, "Death in Venice," and Buddenbrooks still find their readers, a mere five decades have apparently sufficed to raze the pyramid oi Joseph, leaving few traces of what Mann intended as his magnum opus.

  Why? For starters, there is the book's publishing history— Germany's history. The first volume. The Stories of Jacob, appeared in October 1933. The Nazis had spent their first nine months tightening the terror, Thomas Mann and his family were already in exile, and there were few who dared express open approval of the book. Despite mounting difficulties, S. Fischer Verlag managed to publish a small edition of volume 2, Young Joseph, in April of the following year. By 1936, however, S. Fischer had already been forced to move to Vienna, where Joseph in Egypt was published. The Nazis allowed the work to be sold inside the Reich, but permitted no reviews and engaged in bureaucratic chicaneries to make sure it did not sell. Joseph the Provider appeared, then, in neutral Stockholm, in 1943. After the war, modest editions were offered once or twice a decade, the first in 1948, but the work never recovered from its shaky early years.

  The sheer bulk of the thing surely worked against it as well: four formidable volumes, a veritable encyclopedia of ancient Near Eastern myth, history, theology, and cultural anthropology—and all just to retell a (once) familiar Bible story? And who in postwar Germany would read it? Many Christians found it heterodox to the point of heresy; any Jewish readership had been largely exterminated in the death camps. Communists in the East had no use for a "religious" Thomas Mann. Intellectuals in the West were not particularly keen on "biblical" novels, either. Besides, in 1947 Mann's Doctor Faustus had become the focus of interest for Mann's readers. It spoke directly to the evil that had befallen Germany and the world. Joseph seemed more remote than ever.

  On this side of the Adantic, the book's reception, if seldom ciiilui-siastic, was somewhat warmer—Mann was living, after all, among us as the representative of the "good Germany" niid xolume . Joseph the

  JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS

  Provider, \'as written under the California sun. A single-olume edition incorporating all four noels vas first published in 1948 and remained in print into the 1990s. But o'er the years, the larger American reading public, accustomed to historical biblical noels in the Ben-Hur and Silver Chalice mode, has quite understandably ieved Joseph as forbiddingly Germanic. And more intrepid readers, who find an intellectual home in The Magic Mountain or Doctor Faustus, have been just as reluctant as their European counterparts to embrace a work that seems so far remoed from the concerns of our time. Beyond the issue of subject matter, there is another difficult)-. Howe'er unfairly. Americans have tended to think of Mann as a wxiter of turgid and dense, if not almost unreadable prose. .nd here are almost fifteen hundred pages that, in Helen Lowe-Porter's translation, can often read rather like the King James Bible run amok—replete with "he saith" and "thou knowest.''

  Joseph and His Brothers deseres a far better fate. It is, by my lights, an epic comedy of extraordinary' grandeur. If Thomas Mann regarded it as his magnum opus, that was in part because he wrote Joseph as a master craftsman at the height of his powers. He knew it to be, he said, a work of "quality." Here is a ast canvas of mythic sweep, dark beauty, and historical complexity, and Mann applies each stroke with incomparable skill—with a sovereignty revealed most especially in the work's humanits' and, yes, its humor

  And yet the question remains how best should a reader approach a work so monumental and complex—plunge in at page i and dexil take the hindmost? That is. after all, the way Mann wTote it to be read. With considerable trepidation, I would like to suggest a different strategy for first-time readers of this great no'el. I propose you start with "The Story of Dinah," part 3 of The Stories of Jacob. Based on a Bible story- (Genesis 33'17-350) i^^^'^r taught in the Sunday schools of my youth, this t
ale of passion and re'enge becomes, in Mann's hand, a marxelous epitome of the xirtues of the noel as a whole. My hope, and my guess, is that you will be irreocably caught up in this great literary adenture and eager to climb the "pyramid." But beware: don't begin at the beginning even yet. For those just getting their climbing legs in shape, "Prelude: Descent into Hell" may well turn out to be literally that. This opening chapter's larger historical and theological perspecti'es introduce many of the themes that Mann will weae into his four noels, but without a story to hang them on, you may well feel he has pushed you over the edge and down a well that is indeed bottomless. So. "Dinah'' first, then back to

  INTRODUCTION

  part I, "At the Well"—and at some point, halfway up volume i or so, you will want to look back, and give the Prelude its due, for it has monumental rewards. If I read it right, Mann has woven his own Gnostic myth here in order to show not only myth's mystery, grandeur, and ineflfability, but also its ultimate fragility, even untrust-worthiness—not unlike the story of Joseph he is about to tell. One more hint: take time to reacquaint (or acquaint) yourself with Genesis, reading it a chapter or two at a time in step with the story as Mann tells it. This will enhance one of the special pleasures oi Joseph and His Brothers: watching as Thomas Mann deftly reshapes one people's account of its beginnings and its faith in its God, turning that ancient text into richly detailed stories about splendidly vivid characters, each a manifestation of Mann's faith in our common humanity.

  And now a word about something no translator should explicitly talk to readers about—translation. The craft should speak for itself, but perhaps a footnote is in order here. This is only the second translation o{ Joseph into English, and for those familiar with the previous one, it will come as something of a surprise. There is precious litde "biblical" language here, but instead, or so I hope, a rich polyphony of voices, ancient and modern—for that is what Mann himself said he was trying to achieve. He almost never quotes Luther's translation of the Bible verbatim; instead he tinkers with it, teasing out its images and heightening its effects for his own purposes. In translating Jo5^/?/z, Helen Lowe-Porter often chose to limit herself, and Mann, to a diction modeled on the King James Bible—perhaps the only choice she thought possible at a time when that version was still the language in which English-speaking people imagined a biblical narrative had to be told. But it is not Mann's language. The voice o{Joseph is an exuberant hodgepodge, happily at home with both anachronisms and archaisms, now elegantly sublime, now comically coarse. And always, there is the prose of Thomas Mann, flowing in grand periods of thought, each resembling nothing so much as a movement in a Mozart sonata, with themes and counterthemes unfolding in vivid conversation. I hope I have been able to provide some echo of that music in this translation.

  Joseph and His Brothers is a novel of innumerable, complex delights, and yet there are also passages here — and who more than the translator should know this—that seem to defy many readers' sensibilities of what a novel should be. At times Mann's novel simply stops and ponders. Mann — or at least this is my suspicion — wanted to make

  JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS

  sure he had readers worthy of him. As a result, some passages resemble nothing so much as a pyramid hulking in the desert—do take time to contemplate the riddles. And then, within a page or two, you are sure to be swept up again in Mann's grand narratie, in our common human enterprise told as the story of Jacob, Esau, Laban, Leah, Rachel, Eliezer, Re'uben, Judah, Tamar, Benjamin, Mont-kaw, Petepre, Mut-em-enet, Mai-Sakhme, Ikhnaton—and Joseph. Thomas Mann calls this epic comedy "God's invention"—by which, of course, he also immodesUy imputes a certain divinity to its human coinventor.

  John E. Woods 2 September 2003

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  WORKS BY THOMAS MANN

  There are two good German editions of Mann: the East German Aufbau Verlag edition in twelve volumes (Berlin, 1956), long out of print; and the more complete Stockholmer Ausgabe, published by S. Fischer Verlag, in twenty volumes (Frankfurt am Main, 1965). For dates of first publication, see the chronology.

  During Thomas Mann's lifetime most English editions of Mann were translated by Mrs. Helen Lowe-Porter, whom the author made the exclusive copyrighted translator of almost all his works. Over the past thirty years, and especially within the last decade, new editions of Mann's earlier works have appeared, most notably the four principal novels, Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faus-tus, and now Joseph and His Brothers, translated by John E. Woods. The works listed below, with dates of first publication in English, are still in print:

  Royal Highness, 1916

  Buddenbrooks, 1924

  Death in Venice, 1928

  Tonio Kroger, 1929

  The Magic Mountain, 1930

  Mario and the Magician, 1930

  Joseph and His Brothers, 1934-1944

  Lotte in Weimar / The Beloved Returns, 1940

  The Transposed Heads, 1941

  Doctor Faustus, 1947

  The Holy Sinner, 1951

  The Black Swan, 1954

  The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, 1955

  Thomas Mann Diaries, 1918-19J9, edited by Hermann Kesten, translated by Richard and Clara Winston (Andre Deutsch, 1983). Fragmentary but still eloquent testament of Mann's inner life.

  Thomas Mann: Pro and Contra Wagner, translated by Allan Blun-den, introduction by Erich Heller (Faber & Faber, 1985). Documents the lifelong obsession of an imperfect Wagnerite.

  JOSEPH AXD HIS BROTHERS

  GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

  BLACKBOURN, DAVID, and EVANS, RICHARD J., eds. The German Bourgeoisie, Routledge, 1991. Historical essays on Mann's milieu. BRUFORD, w. H., The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation. "Bildt^ng" from Humboldt to Thomas Mann, Cambridge University Press, 1975. Chapters on The Magic Mountain and "The Conversion of an Unpolitical Man" by a great scholar.

  CARNEGY, PATRICK, Faust as Musician: A Study of Thomas Mann's Novel "Doctor Faustus," New Directions, 1973. Subtle investigation of Mann and music by a leading opera critic and producer. DE MENDELSSOHN, PETER, Dcr Zaubcrcr Das Lehen des deutschen Schriftstellers Thomas Mann, Frankfurt, 1975. The standard German biography.

  GRAY, R. D., The German Tradition in Literature 18/1-194^, Cambridge University Press, 1965. A highly critical account of Mann's contemporaries and their ideas.

  HAMILTON, NIGEL, The Brothers Mann, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 1978. A biographical study of Thomas Mann and his elder brother Heinrich, an eminent novelist in his own right. HAYMAN, RONALD, Thomas Mann: A Biography, Scribner, 1995. Reliable life and times by the author of biographies of Kafka, Brecht, Nietzsche and Proust.

  HEILBUT, ANTHONY, Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature, Knopf, 1995. Revisionist biography, emphasizing links between Mann's ho-mosexualitiy and his works.

  HELLER, ERICH, The Ironic German. A Study of Thomas Mann, Little, Brown, 1958. This remains far and away the best book on Mann. Heller's best-known book. The Disinherited Mind, Barnes and Noble, 1971, gives the intellectual background to Mann. His German collection. Die Wiederkehr der Unschuld und andere Essays, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1977, contains three essays on Mann. One of this is "Thomas Mann in Venice," published in The Poet's Self and the Poem, Athlone Press, 1976. Heller, who died in 1991, also wrote an introduction to the earHer Everyman volume of Thomas Mann: Stories and Episodes, Dent, i960. HOLLINGDALE, R. J., Thomas Mann. A Critical Study, Bucknell University Press, 1971. The author, a Nietzsche scholar and translator, is especially worth reading on Mann's debts to the philosopher. JOHNSON, DANIEL, introduction to Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Other Stories, Everyman's Library, 1991. Background to Mann's most celebrated story.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  LAWRENCE, D. H,, "German Books: Thomas Mann" (1913), in: ^ Selection from Phoenix, Peregrine, 1971. Among the first English reviews of Death in Venice. Lawrence rampant: "Thomas Mann is old—and we are young."

  MANN, GOLO, Reminiscences and Reflecti
ons: Growing Up in Germany, Norton, 1990. ChiUing, unsparing account of Thomas Mann as a father by his historian son.

  PASCAL, ROY, From Naturalism to Expressionism. German Literature and Society 1880-1918, Oxford University Press, 1973. Fine on background to the young Mann.

  PRATER, DONALD, Thomas Mann: A Life, Oxford University Press, 1995. The best of the recent crop of biographies, placing Mann in his literary, social and political context.

  REED, T. J., Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition, Oxford University Press, 1974. Careful scholarship by the author of a critical edition of Death in Venice.

  REICH-RANICKI, MARCEL, Thomas Mann and His Family, Fontana Press, 1989. Provocative essays on Thomas, Heinrich, Klaus, Katja, Erika and Golo Mann by Germany's most influential literary critic, based in part on personal acquaintance.

  SONTHEIMER, KURT. Thomas Mann und die Deutschen, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 1965. A lively German apologia for Mann the political contortionist.

  STERN, J. p. Hitler The Fiihrer and the People, University of California Press, 1975; yl Study of Nietzsche, Cambridge University Press, 1979. Opposite poles of Mann's cosmos.

  TAYLOR, RONALD, Literature and Society in Germany, 1918-194^, Barnes and Noble, 1980. Reliable work on the period of Mann's triumph and exile.

  WYSLING, HANS (cd.). Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900-1949, University of California Press, 1998. Riveting chronicle of fraternal rivalry.

  CHRONOLOGY

  DATE 1871

  1872 1875

  1876

  1892

  1894

  1895 1896 1896-8

  AUTHOR'S LIFE

  Paul Thomas Mann born on 6 June as the second son of Johann Heinrich Mann, a leading businessman and senator of the north German Hanse city of Liibeck.

  On the death of Senator Mann, the family grain firm goes into liquidation. Thomas Mann and his brother Heinrich are left with sufBcient means to live independently and try to establish themseh-es as wTiters. Leaes school and moves south to Munich, where his mother has setded.

  His first story, "FaUen," is published in a naturahst literary-jour nal. Society {Die GeselLschaJf).

  Prolonged stay in Italy—Rome and Palestrina—with his brother Heinrich. Further short fiction appears in the leading literary journal of the day, TheXew Review {Dieeue Rundschau), published by the house of Samuel Fischer.