When Hermann Broch began the work of completing and publishing his first major literary work, the trilogy Die Schlafwandler, in the early 1930s, French and English were the two languages into which he wanted his work to be translated. A businessman by trainng, Broch was always writing his publishers with ideas for expanding his audience -- a fact that led to suggestions on the languages, packaging and advertising of the trilogy and which often drove his editors and publishers, Daniel Brody and Georg Friedrich Meyer, to reprimand his efforts on such matters (Broch and Brody 1971, 31-32; 34). Translation was also a part of his literary landscape in Central Europe and in Vienna; it informed his decision to publish Die Schlafwandler with the Rhein Verlag, the publisher of the German translation of Ulysses (KW 9/1, 92). As the German-language market and audience shrank with the Nazi censorship of literature and the impact of forced exile, genocide, and war, translation became a means of economic survival for Broch. As a practitioner of the modernist novel, Broch positioned his German-language novels and his reflections on translation within an international literary and political context, as did the English-language translators of his major works Die Schlafwandler and Der Tod des Vergil, Edwin and Willa Muir and Jean Starr Untermeyer. In the post-war context of institutional and international peace building, translation and its relationship to nation and national culture became a topic that extended into a global context, and the field of translation became a professional and academic endeavor.

McGaughey, Sarah. The Death of Virgil and The Sleepwalkers: The Democratic-Pacifist Mission of Translation. In Massenwahntheorie und Friedenspoetik : Hermann Broch und die bedrohte Demokratie des 20. Jahrhunderts, edited by Sarah McGaughey, Elisa Risi, Daniel Weidner, and Doren Wohlleben, 51-67. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111222394-004/html

© 2023 by the authors, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.
This book is available as an Open Access publication via www.degruyter.com. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License No Derivatives 4.0 International License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Sarah McGaughey is a professor of German at Dickinson College.

This published version is made available on Dickinson Scholar with the permission of the publisher. For more information on the published version, visit De Gruyter's Website. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111222394-004/html

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