Theodor Fontane

Theodor Fontane (1819 – 1898) was a popular 19th-century German-language novelist whose works are still widely read in German but are not as commonly found in English translation. Most of Fontane's life was spent in cosmopolitan Berlin, the thriving capital of Bismarck's newly-unified Germany. After a successful career in journalism and travel writing, beginning in his late fifties, Fontane produced a novel every two or three years until the end of his life. Several of these later works are considered masterpieces.

Fontane is known as a writer of realism, not only because he was conscientious about the factual accuracy of details in fictional scenes, but also because he depicted his characters in terms of what they said or did and refrained from overtly imputing motives to them. The world of these novels in one in which everyone seems powerless, constrained by convention if nothing else. The novels delved into topics that were more or less taboo for discussion in polite society of Fontane's day, including marital infidelity, abandonment of children, and suicide. His characters range from lower-middle class to Prussian nobility. Fontane's novels are challenging to translate, with lyrical and linguistic motifs as clear as the famous musical motifs in Prokofiev's Peter in the Wolf, and for the accurate depiction of the story, there are no sentences or details which can be considered superfluous. The variety of titles chosen by translators for two of the works below perfectly illustrates the many varied directions a translation can take.

English translations of the most reknown novels.

This is still very incomplete, for now.

• Unterm Birnbaum, 1885 - An enduringly popular crime mystery, where the tension is not about who did what (we sort of know), but how much of the details will ever come out.
  • Under the Pear Tree translated by Patricia Tiney; Huddersfield : Belgarun, 2009 (print-on-demand)
• Irrungen, Wirrungen, 1888 - About an affair between a wealthy officer and a lower-middle-class Berlin girl.
  • Delusions, Illusions
  • On Tangled Paths - translated by ?; Penguin reprint (June 6, 2013), 189 pages.
• Unwiederbrichlich, 1891 - About a troubled marriage in Holstein in 1859-1861, five years before the German/Danish war.
  • Beyond Recall translated by Douglas Parmée; London, Oxford University Press, 1964 (out of print)
  • Irretrievable translated by Douglas Parmée; New York Review of Books, 2011 (Kindle)
  • No Way Back, translated by Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers
• Frau Jenny Treibel, 1892 - About attempts by a schoolmaster's daughter to marry new wealth.
  • tbd
• Effi Briest, 1894 - About a wronged husband conventionally seeking retribution for a long-past affair.
  • tbd

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