Dicta and Contradicta [Hardcover]

Karl Kraus (Author), Jonathan McVity (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 10, 2001

'A woman is more than just her exterior. The lingerie is also important'. The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span. 'Art serves to rinse out our eyes'. Uniquely combining humor with profundity and venom with compassion, "Dicta and Contradicta" is a bonanza of scandalous wit from Vienna's answer to Oscar Wilde. From the decadent turn of the century to the Third Reich, the acerbic satirist Karl Kraus was one of the most famous-and feared-intellectuals in Europe. Through the polemical and satirical magazine "Die Fackel" ("The Torch"), which he founded in 1899, Kraus launched wicked but unrelentingly witty attacks on literary and media corruption, sexual repression and militarism, and the social hypocrisy of fin-de-sicle Vienna. Kraus' barbed aphorisms were an essential part of his running commentary on Viennese culture. These miniature gems, as sharp as diamonds, demonstrate Kraus' highly cultivated wit and his unerring eye for human weakness, flaccidity, and hypocrisy. Kraus shies away from nothing; the salient issues of the day are lined up side by side, as before a firing squad, with such perennial concerns as sexuality, religion, politics, art, war, and literature. By turns antagonistic, pacifistic, realistic, and maddeningly misogynistic, Kraus' aphorisms provide the sting that precedes healing. For "Dicta and Contradicta", originally published in 1909 (with the title "Spruche und Widerspruche") and revised in 1923, Kraus selected nearly 1,000 of the scathing aphorisms that had appeared in "Die Fackel". In this new translation, Jonathan McVity masterfully renders Kraus' multilayered meanings, preserving the clever wordplay of the German in readable colloquial English. He also provides an introductory essay on Kraus' life and milieu and annotations that clarify many of Kraus' literary and sociohistorical allusions.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"McVity's volume is ... important both as translation and as evidence that Kraus can be translated... Others ... have tried their hand at translating the aphorisms, but McVity is the most ambitious... McVity masterfully preserves the flavor, spirit, meaning, and intent of the original." -- Choice "McVity takes the refreshing view that translation is an opportunity rather than an impossibility, and he has some wonderfully inventive equivalents for Kraus's wordplay." -- Michael Wood, London Review of Books "These 9l8 aphorisms, courageously translated by John McVity, reveal Kraus in all his truculent, rebarbative, crap-cutting glory. Like postcards lost in the dead-letter office for the better part of a century, they call up a world no longer our own and yet manage to speak with surprising frequency to many of our most abiding concerns." - Martin Jay, author of Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time "McVity has done the seemingly impossible: translate the complex and quirky wisdoms of one of the greatest twentieth-century masters of the German language into an English that is not only coherent but lets the brilliance of the original shine through." - Fred Viebahn, University of Virginia "The volume includes, for the first time in English, the entire text of Kraus's first book of aphorisms... For all of Kraus's political intricacies, 'the most painful part' of translating his work into modern English ... is capturing his ingenious and assiduous wordplay." -- Aaron Retica, Lingua Franca.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press (May 10, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0252026489
• ISBN-13: 978-0252026485
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,368,546 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Great moralist, critic, wit, November 22, 2001

By 

Nicolas S. Martin (Indianapolis, IN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dicta and Contradicta (Hardcover)

Kraus is almost unknown to Americans, but he was one of the shining social critics of the 20th century. He was the first major debunker of Freudian nonsense. He wrote brilliantly on language, politics, and culture. He was, like all great critics, fearless.

This book is a mixed presentation, including many quotes that seem outdated or inscrutible. It also has the editor's odd and distorted rendering of Kraus.

If you are unfamilair with Kraus you will be better served by Thomas Szasz's "Anti-Freud : Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry."...The Szasz book provides fascinating biographical info about Kraus. Szasz has also nicely translated many of Kraus's pithiest and funniest aphorisms.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Encore! Add these to your list of great minds., December 11, 2002

By 

Dave Beckwith - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dicta and Contradicta (Hardcover)

This book heralds the emergence of two great minds.
Karl Kraus, who because of his fearless critique of the media, politics, religion, and the other humbugs of the world Hitler & Co. was trying to shove down the world's throat...and Mr. McVity, who not only translates the difficult work of Kraus brilliantly, but provides, in his concluding essay, a history and examination of Kraus and his world, and great insights into those troubling times, whose wake we are still witnessing... but also rises, in his own writing, to such heights and depths as to be truly humbling. And yet I am excited that such a mind might surface in such a time as this...where content nor form offer much to chew on, beyond the official story and the infantile rant.

Share this wondrous book with your friends, but realize it may return dog-eared, pages now sea-foam green in highlighter. Sharing, after all, is a very Krausian thing to do. Karl Kraus donated much of his proceeds to homeless shelters, low-cost housing, Quakers caring for starving tubercular children, and the like. And Kraus shared ideas and art with his friends Brecht, Wittgenstein, Schoenberg, Rilke, and others whose greatness is already well-known, perhaps because of their being less a thorn in the side of the system.
As Kraus once said, "Art serves to rinse out our eyes."
But I would also suggest that his, and McVity's, art serves to rinse out our ears as well. Especially since our ears are now filled with the likes of...well...you know! But "Kraus named names." Read all about it! And then imagine random names such as Rush, O'Reilly, and others that miraculously make their way to the top of the list, forgetting perhaps that the list is boogerpasted to the wall of a sandbox. [Head shakes left then right. Repeat.]

I am pleased to give this book 5-stars, but regret that I couldn't give it more. As Lin Yutang once said: "I regard the discovery of one's favorite author as the most critical event in one's intellectual development. There is such a thing as affinity of spirits, and among authors of ancient and modern times, one must try to find an author whose spirit is akin with his own."

I eagerly await the next offerings of this protean mind among us, and urge that he not limit himself to translations, as his own writing is such a pleasure, and translations do take so dreadfully long...

14 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Truth never dies, it just gets new teeth, April 27, 2004

By 

Campbell Roark "tri-zeta" (from under the floorboards and through the woods...) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dicta and Contradicta (Hardcover)

Chicken soup for the spleen!

Damn. And I thought I had a bleak perspective and a cutting cacpcity for quick critical insight- Karl leaves me and everyone else in the dirt. A comedian could quite possibly mine an entire erudite, Dennis Miller-esque routine from this book. Kraus' witticisms are as spot-on today as they were when he edited Die Fackel (The Torch), in Vienna about a century ago.

My only beef- it's a lot of dough for not a lot of tree-gut. I mean 918 aphorisms? these aren't sprawling, long-winded Nietzschian aphorisms. They're quick. And this is a page turner... Ah well, it still gets the 5 for being so damn right!

Hey- if you think people (by and large) are lying, manipulative, weak, dishonest scum- this is a book for you. Great essay by the translator too!