The Tin Drum - Hardcover

Grass, Gunter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151014167 ISBN 13: 9780151014163

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 2009

Synopsis

The Tin Drum, one of the great novels of the twentieth century, was published in Ralph Manheim's outstanding translation in 1959. It became a runaway bestseller and catapulted its young author to the forefront of world literature.

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, along with Grass’s publishers all over the world, is bringing out a new translation of this classic novel. Breon Mitchell, acclaimed translator and scholar, has drawn from many sources: from a wealth of detailed scholarship; from a wide range of newly-available reference works; and from the author himself. The result is a translation that is more faithful to Grass’s style and rhythm, restores omissions, and reflects more fully the complexity of the original work.

After fifty years, THE TIN DRUM has, if anything, gained in power and relevance. All of Grass’s amazing evocations are still there, and still amazing: Oskar Matzerath, the indomitable drummer; his grandmother, Anna Koljaiczek; his mother, Agnes; Alfred Matzerath and Jan Bronski, his presumptive fathers; Oskar’s midget friendsBebra, the great circus master and Roswitha Raguna, the famous somnambulist; Sister Scholastica and Sister Agatha, the Right Reverend Father Wiehnke; the Greffs, the Schefflers, Herr Fajngold, all Kashubians, Poles, Germans, and Jewswaiting to be discovered and re-discovered.

About this title

Review:

"Given Grass's close involvement with this new translation, it is fair to call this the definitive version of arguably the most important German novel of the post-war era." (Phil Mongredien Observer Review)

"Mitchell has captured the novel's syncopated, driving rhythms with an extra brio and brilliance." (Boyd Tonkin Independent)

"The Tin Drum has had an enduring impact on international fiction, and to read this new translation is to experience a novel you may or may not already know and discover a living, talking, shouting work of art." (Irish Times, Books of the Year)

"Grass published his milestone of postwar literature 50 years ago, and the event is being celebrated with new translations...Mitchell's excellent translation reveals the novel as a timeless masterpiece." (The Times)

"At the ages of fourteen and fifteen, I had read Great Expectations twice - Dickens made me want to be a writer - but it was reading The Tin Drum at nineteen and twenty that showed me how. It was Günter Grass who demonstrated that it was possible to be a living writer who wrote with Dickens' full range of emotion and relentless outpouring of language. Grass wrote with fury, love, derision, slapstick, pathos - all with an unforgiving conscience." (John Irving, New York Times Book Review)

Book Description:

A new translation of the landmark novel with a new foreword by the author

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0151014167
• ISBN 13: 9780151014163
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 582