Questions about "Grace Under Pressure" in English Translations of Death in Venice

Journal article

Russ Pottle

Hemingway Review, Vol.45(1), pp.120-128

2025

Metrics

1 Record Views

Title: Questions about "Grace Under Pressure" in English Translations of Death in Venice
Author/Creator: Russ Pottle
Publication Details: Hemingway Review, Vol.45(1), pp.120-128
Annotation: "Grace under pressure" is almost universally attributed to Ernest Hemingway. However, in 2017 Andrew Farah argued that Thomas Mann invented it in his 1912 novella Death in Venice and that Hemingway appropriated it once the novella was translated into English in 1924 by Kenneth Burke. Farah's claim is impossible: Mann, writing in German, couldn't have coined a phrase in English, and Burke's translation does not use that phrase. Still, "grace under pressure" made its way into late-twentieth and earl-twenty-first century English translations of Death in Venice, as translators employed Hemingway's own words to bring Mann's work to wider audiences.
Academic Unit: Hemingway Bibliography
Resource Type: Journal article
Record Identifier: 991015417572603691