Lenz

Lenz, Georg Buchner's visionary exploration of an 18th century playwright's descent into madness, grew in part out of Alsatian pastor Oberlin's journal, which is translated here in its entirety for the first time. Lenzis a dispassionate account on the nervous system of a schizophrenic, perhaps the first third-person text ever written from the "inside" of insanity. At his death at the age of 23 in 1837, Georg Buchner also left behind Leonce and Lena, Woyzeck, and Danton's Death--psychologically and politically acute plays well ahead of their time. Richard Sieburth's translations include Friedrich Holderlin's Hymns and Fragments, Walter Benjamin's Moscow Diary, Gerard de Nerval's Selected Writingsand Henri Michaux's Emergences/Resurgences. His English edition of the Nerval won the 2000 PEN Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize.

At his death at the age of 24 in 1837, Georg Büchner also left behind Leonce and Lena, Woyzeck, and Danton’s Death—bold, psychologically and politically acute plays that were also well ahead of their time. His dramatic works exercised a profound influence on Brecht and Ionesco, as well as on the composer Alban Berg and the filmmaker Werner Herzog. Richard Sieburth’s translations include Gérard de Nerval’s Selected Writings, Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hymns and Fragments, Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary, Henri Michaux’s Emergences/ Resurgences and Stroke by Stroke, Gérard de Nerval’s The Salt Smugglers, Michel Leiris’ Nights as Day, Days as Night, and Gershom Scholem’s The Fullness of Time: Poems. His edition of Nerval’s Selected Writings won the 2000 PEN/Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize. His recent translation of Maurice Scève’s Délie was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize and the Weidenfeld Prize.