Bertolt Brecht

One day Frederic Prokosch wrote a novel. He was 27 years old, living with his parents in New Haven, Connecticut, and desperate to be published. Leafing through an old atlas, he had visions of Lebanon and Syria, of the apricot trees of Damascus, the pilgrims travelling from Transcaucasia, and the Orontes River flowing among the rocks. His visions grew more vivid and the voices clearer: ‘I leaned forward in my chair and started to write as though mesmerised.’ The resultant book, The Asiatics, was an immediate success, praised by the likes of Thomas Mann, Albert Camus and André Gide. Others, however, were less sure. How could one write about Asia

The translator’s preface to the third volume of The Aesthetics of Resistance informs us that ‘Several deadlines came and went on the way to this translation’. That is quite the understatement. The German edition of Peter Weiss’s 1,000-page historical novel appeared in 1975. A full English translation has been in the offing for more than 20 years. In the meantime, Weiss has won just about every literary accolade Germany has to offer, and his play Marat/Sade has become known as the theatrical ‘starting gun’ of the 1960s. Whatever the translator Joel Scott has in store for us, it had better be worth the wait. Weiss was moved to write his