Dicta and Contradicta
About the Book
"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), Kraus launched wicked but unrelentingly witty attacks on literary and media corruption, sexual repression and militarism, and the social hypocrisy of fin-de-siècle Vienna.
Kraus's barbed aphorisms were an essential part of his running commentary on Viennese culture. These miniature gems, as sharp as diamonds, demonstrate Kraus's highly cultivated wit and his unerring eye for human weakness, flaccidity, and hypocrisy. For the original 1909 edition of Dicta and Contradicta, Kraus selected nearly 1,000 of the scathing aphorisms that had appeared in Die Fackel. In this new translation, Jonathan McVity masterfully renders Kraus's multilayered meanings, preserving the clever wordplay of the German in readable colloquial English. He also provides an introductory essay on Kraus's life and milieu and annotations that clarify many of Kraus's literary and sociohistorical allusions.
About the Author
Karl Kraus (1874-1936) was the editor of and chief contributor to the journal Die Fackel and the author of several works for the stage, including The Last Days of Mankind. Jonathan McVity, a partner with Twentieth Century Art and Antiques in Charlottesville, Virginia, holds a bachelors degree in English from Oxford University.Reviews
Blurbs
"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
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