{"id":83,"date":"2017-05-21T19:37:00","date_gmt":"2017-05-21T19:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:10060\/?p=83"},"modified":"2021-05-01T03:48:44","modified_gmt":"2021-05-01T03:48:44","slug":"beware-of-pity-by-stefan-zweig","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/localhost:10060\/beware-of-pity-by-stefan-zweig\/","title":{"rendered":"Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
I should have known. It was there in the title. It said beware. But I had to be headstrong. I had to go my own way and read Beware of Pity<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, the truth be told, I didn\u2019t actually read Beware of Pity<\/em>. That might sound like an admission unworthy of a writer, but I did try. Perhaps Zweig\u2019s longest fiction work is much more enthralling in the original German. And if I had been fluent in German maybe I would be writing a review of the book like that of Alfred Hickling: \u201cZweig constructs a devastating account of what happens when pity is misconstrued as love and brilliantly relays the catastrophic effects of arousing unwanted passion.\u201d Or maybe I might have shared Salman Rushdie\u2019s sentiment after reading Beware of Pity<\/em>: \u201cIt\u2019s good to have Zweig back.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m not sure where Zweig went, but a reader of a translation will always have difficulty finding the author\u2019s intended meaning. You\u2019re forced to come at the work and the author\u2019s mind through the interpretation of others. Translators, editors, and everyone in between\u2014there could be a whole room of people adding their take to the story. Sadly there\u2019s no escaping it. There\u2019s always some of the author\u2019s art that gets lost in translation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But maybe that\u2019s not what happened with me. Maybe, like so many things, the timing just wasn\u2019t right. Pity. I liked the cover.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I should have known. It was there in the title. It said beware. But I had to be headstrong. I had to go my own way and read Beware of Pity. Well, the truth be told, I didn\u2019t actually read Beware of Pity. That might sound like an admission unworthy of a writer, but I did try. Perhaps […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":273,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n