MOUNTAINS OCEANS GIANTS complete
The first complete (but slightly abridged) English text of Döblin’s challenging dystopia is now ready for download, along with a separate document containing the omitted parts. Readers can (I hope) enjoy reading the whole book to the end, while serious fans can consider Döblin’s intentions in light of the full text. .
DOWNLOADS
UPDATE 1: The Translator’s Introduction in Vol 1 has been revised from the version posted on 6 March 2019, as has the preamble to the Omitted Passages.
UPDATE 2: Since MOG will be published as a book /ebook in spring 2020, the downloads have been de-activated.
Volume 1 The Urals War (contains Parts 1 – 5) PDF 166 pages, 1.9MB
Volume 2 The Greenland Venture (c0ntains parts 6 – 9) PDF 168 pages, 1.MB
Passages omitted from the published text can still be downloaded here:
MOG – Omitted Passages PDF 940KB
Notes on the Translation
Döblin’s quirky modernistic prose is rife with deviant sentence structures. These are tricky to reproduce in English – our nouns are not capitalised, our morphology is stripped down (e.g. does ‘lived’ match ‘gelebt’ or ‘lebte’?). The deviant punctuation with many comma-less lists of nouns, verbs, adjectives is retained insofar as it does not cause ambiguity. I have tried to retain some modernist flavour while not burdening the reader with excessively contorted prose, while also striving to convey the immense vigour of the original, with its cacophony of sounds, its vivid sights and restless movements.
Döblin presents the reader of what is already a challenging work with a wall of text: paragraphs often pages long (not uncommon in German literature); sections within each Part marked only by a single line break. I have adopted a more English paragraphing, and have supplied short section headings.
I have silently amended typos, misspellings and clear geographical errors (e.g. ‘east’ where the context requires ‘west’). Where possible I have checked place names, and adopted current standard spellings. In a few cases historical names are amended to the current name (e.g. ‘Oslo’ not ‘Christiana’). The excellent online map of Iceland at http://kortasja.lmi.is was extremely helpful in following Döblin’s geography of Iceland and locating many place names.
The most difficult decision in preparing the English text was presented by Parts 3 and 4, which Döblin himself confessed had grown almost to form a separate novel. Here he was attempting to resolve his still ambivalent view of humans and their place in the world – to be admired as all-powerful Prometheans, or pitied as pygmies impotent against the immensity of Nature and the Cosmos? (His next two epics Manas and Berlin Alexanderplatz would continue this attempt.) In contradiction to his strongly-expressed opposition to the Personal in fiction (“nothing but swindle and lyricism”) in these two Parts he explored interpersonal and sexual relationships in the form of two triangles: Marduk-Jonathan-La Balladeuse, and Jonathan-Elina-Marduk, and sought to link the private – emotions and eroticism – on the one hand with the political and public on the other. Whatever their intrinsic merits, these lengthy explorations significantly delay the reader’s arrival at the enthralling core of the epic: the Iceland-Greenland venture. I have therefore abridged Parts 3 and 4 by completely omitting two storylines totalling about 23,000 words.
