Perlefter: The Story of A Bourgeois

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While I was hard at work translating Joseph Roth’s The Hundred Days I vowed it would be my last Roth translation. But all the while the question lurked in the back of my mind — dare I attempt one final challenge? Should I take on Perlefter? Was it a worthwhile endeavour? Indeed, it existed in German, but the effort required by Kiepenheuer & Witsch to publish it was limited to deciphering and transcribing Roth’s longhand. Translation is another story entirely.

Was this partial manuscript, one that Roth had abandoned ten years before he died, one that was probably between halfway and two-thirds completed, worthy of publication in English? It helped somewhat knowing that Roberto Bravo de la Varga had deemed it a worthy project to translate Perlefter into Spanish (published in 2006 together with Strawberries, which, incidentally, also features a character named Napthali Kroj). Was there anything inherently wrong with translating an unfinished work?

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