Lenz

by Georg Buchner Narrated by Roland Astor

Overview

hr2 Hörbuch-Bestenliste März '99: In dieser Novelle beschreibt Georg Büchner ¿ein Stück aus dem Leben des an Schizophrenie leidenden Sturm-und-Drang-Dichters J.M.R.Lenz. (¿) Der Schauspieler Roland Astor versteht es sehr gut, mit seiner schlichten und unauffälligen Betonung die innere Kraft dieses Fragments zum Leuchten zu bringen.(¿) Ein echter Klassiker.“

Hörwelt 4/99: ¿¿hier kann der Sprecher Roland Astor seine hervorragenden Qualitäten entwickeln. Die Stimme umfasst jedes Wort, kostet die Betonung der detailreichen, farbigen Sprache schon in der Vorstufe der szenischen Bravourstücke aus ¿ steigert sich in eine Sprache, die der fieberhaften Phantasie des gepeinigten Lenz entsprungen scheint.“

~ from the Hr2 audiobook charts March 1999: In this novel Georg Büchner describes “part of the life of the schizophrenic Sturm und Drang poet, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz... Actor Roland Astor knows how to make the inner strength of this production truly shine with his unpretentious and reserved accentuation...A true classic.”
~ from Hörwelt April 1999: “¿ Narrator Roland Astor is able to develop his outstanding talents with this recording. His voice embraces every word, savors the accentuation of the detailed, colorful language even before the scenic masterworks that follow¿intensifies into speech that seems to stem from the feverish fantasy of the plagued Lenz.”

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

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

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175001182
Publisher:	Naxos Hörbücher
Publication date:	05/13/1998
Edition description:	Unabridged
Language:	German

Read an Excerpt

The 20th, Lenz walked through the mountains. Snow on the peaks and upper slopes, gray rock down into the valleys, swatches of green, boulders, and firs. It was sopping cold, the water trickled down the rocks and leapt across the path. The fir boughs sagged in the damp air. Gray clouds drifted across the sky, but everything so stifling, and then the fog floated up and crept heavy and damp through the bushes, so sluggish, so clumsy. He walked onward, caring little one way or another, to him the path mattered not, now up, now down. He felt no fatigue, except sometimes it annoyed him that he could not walk...

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Lenz"
by .
Copyright © 2004 Georg Buchner.
Excerpted by permission of Steerforth Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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