Re: Juenger essay

[John King <fs6y097@public.uni-hamburg.de>]

On Wed, 26 Feb 1997, Gardner, Daniel wrote:

> I'm interested in publishing something by Ernst Juenger since North 
> Americans' knowledge of this marvellous man is kindly described as limited.
> I wonder if I could receive suggestions.  The work must be within the 
> specified word count, already translated to English, and reasonably 
> retrievable by a busy journalist.  Beyond that anything 
> goes: it could be fiction or non-, an excerpt(s) from one of his books or 
> a free-standing essay.  It is simply most important that it be a good 
> glimpse at Juenger's work and thought.

Well, I guess you have to decide what facet of Ernst Jünger you want to 
portray. As we have seen, the choice is not huge. There really isn't much 
in the way of EJ essays as such translated into English - most of them 
you probably wouldn't want to publish anyway as they don't exactly throw 
the most flattering light on him.

Do you want to portray EJ the soldier? Be careful with the Creighton 
translations - go for "Storm of Steel" rather than "Copse 125", and 
you'll avoid the worst of the nationalist rhetoric. But even so, the 
version that Creighton translated was the 3rd version, which as every 
good EJ philologist knows is the nationalist one, with a good deal of 
commentary added, and with a new foreword which proclaims the 
re-functionalistion of the text as politicised memory. 

Ernst Jünger the novelist is a different case altogether, and the problem 
of revision doesn't really crop up (except with Heliopolis, and, to a 
lesser extent "Afrikanische Spiele"). Here the problems are rather more 
of an editorial nature - finding an extract that is on the one hand 
typical, and on the other, that will fit into the space you have 
available. How about those bits in "Eumeswil" where the narrator goes 
into some detail about the nat of the "Anarch"? Would fit the bill quite 
nicely - sorry I can't give any more precise references.

And Jünger the diarist is again very different. John Morgan listed a 
translation of the Paris Diaries. These have a very complex genesis, but 
are typical for this important area of Jünger's literary production.

The other option is to get someone like me to translate an essay :-)

Hope this was of some help,

Best wishes,

John King