Andre Aciman on Stefan Zweig
by David Gutherz · 11/15/10
Conjure up an image of a cosmopolitan. Chances are, your stock caricature involves a mustachioed, bespectacled type,
his endless stream of octolingual, intellectual chit-chat interrupted only by the occasional cigarette or espresso shot. By all accounts, Stefan Zweig pretty much fit this bill. As Andre Aciman put it in a recent portrait for Slate, “He appears everywhere, knows everyone, and is translated into more languages than any of his contemporaries. Just about everything he put his mind to is stamped with the telltale ease, polish, and effortless grace of people whose success, literary and otherwise, seemed given from the day they were born or picked up a pen.”
There is another, darker side to cosmopolitanism, however. For the cosmopolitan is also frequently an exile. Think of James Joyce–who Zweig helped to translate Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man–writing the Irish soul in Paris. Worse still, because they must rely so much on the kindness of strangers, cosmopolitans can become canaries in the geo-political mine. What we call “culture criticism” is really the ululations of these desperate animals whose habitat (the world-as-community) is being destroyed. Stefan Zweig is also exemplary in this regard. “Everything, or almost everything that represents my work in the world…” he wrote in the magisterial World of Yesterday, ”has been destroyed.”
Andre Aciman has probed the depths of this pain and felt the fleeting pleasures that prepare for it. He is, therefore, perfectly suited to play biographer and critic to this eminent biographer and critic. Read the Slate piece, then go see him discuss Zweig’s Journey Into the Past with NY Review of books regular and Zweig-specialist Joan Acocella on November 29th at the Barnes and Noble 150 Lexington Ave.
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