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The Last Night — Karl Kraus
'There is a new translation of The Last Days of Mankind... and I am happy to report that Michael Russell's translation is excellent -- certainly the best I've seen to date. I only wish it had been available when I began my own work on Kraus!' (Professor Marjorie Perloff, University of Southern California, 'Critical Inquiry')
'Michael Russell's translation of Kraus... is excellent work... really accurate to the German and sounds great in English at the same time.' (Pamela Schermann, Time Zone Theatre Company http://www.timezonetheatre.com )
'This is a translation that we've been needing for a long time.' (Professor Elaine Tennant, University of California, Berkeley)
‘When the age died by its own hand that hand was Karl Kraus's' Bertolt Brecht
Writing in Vienna in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Karl Kraus (1874-1936) is a satirist whose work has been compared to Aristophanes, Juvenal and Jonathan Swift. His writing is barely known in English, yet his great play about the First World War, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, 'The Last Days of Mankind', is a compelling dissection of human folly in the debris of the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire, a prescient vision of a media-dominated world, and one of the 20th century's greatest works of experimental theatre. The play has never been translated fully into English and this version of the epilogue, 'The Last Night', a self-contained verse play-within-a-play, is an introduction to a complete translation of Karl Kraus's 800 page drama to be published in 2015 and 2016. 'The Last Night' was among Bertolt Brecht's first theatrical productions in Berlin in 1930, following the success of 'The Threepenny Opera'. This first ever translation of 'The Last Night', following Kraus's own verse forms, appears almost 100 years after the play was written, and 100 years after the start of World War I, the apocalyptic conflict that 'The Last Days of Mankind' so bitterly chronicles.
Michael Russell has had a long career in television drama and is the author of two novels of historical detective fiction, 'The City of Shadows' and 'The City of Strangers', published by Harper-Collins. In another life he studied English and Medieval Languages (mostly Celtic and Germanic) at Oxford. His translation of 'The Last Days of Mankind' came about... simply because nobody else seemed ready to do it.
'Michael Russell's translation of Kraus... is excellent work... really accurate to the German and sounds great in English at the same time.' (Pamela Schermann, Time Zone Theatre Company http://www.timezonetheatre.com )
'This is a translation that we've been needing for a long time.' (Professor Elaine Tennant, University of California, Berkeley)
‘When the age died by its own hand that hand was Karl Kraus's' Bertolt Brecht
Writing in Vienna in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Karl Kraus (1874-1936) is a satirist whose work has been compared to Aristophanes, Juvenal and Jonathan Swift. His writing is barely known in English, yet his great play about the First World War, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, 'The Last Days of Mankind', is a compelling dissection of human folly in the debris of the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire, a prescient vision of a media-dominated world, and one of the 20th century's greatest works of experimental theatre. The play has never been translated fully into English and this version of the epilogue, 'The Last Night', a self-contained verse play-within-a-play, is an introduction to a complete translation of Karl Kraus's 800 page drama to be published in 2015 and 2016. 'The Last Night' was among Bertolt Brecht's first theatrical productions in Berlin in 1930, following the success of 'The Threepenny Opera'. This first ever translation of 'The Last Night', following Kraus's own verse forms, appears almost 100 years after the play was written, and 100 years after the start of World War I, the apocalyptic conflict that 'The Last Days of Mankind' so bitterly chronicles.
Michael Russell has had a long career in television drama and is the author of two novels of historical detective fiction, 'The City of Shadows' and 'The City of Strangers', published by Harper-Collins. In another life he studied English and Medieval Languages (mostly Celtic and Germanic) at Oxford. His translation of 'The Last Days of Mankind' came about... simply because nobody else seemed ready to do it.
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