The joy of Thomas Mann’s diabolism

Throughout the flat, post-Christmas limbo I lay languishing after another dollop of chemotherapy and read my Christmas present, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, in the later Everyman translation by John E. Woods. Set alongside H.T. Lowe-Porter’s sturdier pre-war translation, the difference was more marginal than I’d been led to believe by John E. Woods’s online trumpeters, and in many cases the old workhorse H.T. Lowe-Porter’s choice of words was more graceful and economical. Or so it appeared to this particular unwashed, unshaven reader with food stains on his pyjamas, drugged up to the gills on morphine, antibiotics and Domestos, or whatever it is the nurse dripped into the tube opening in my neck. But on every page there came a word, phrase or sentence in the new translation that was as deft and incisive as a through ball by Luka Modric struck with the outside of the boot, so I stuck with that.