Hermann Broch

El poeta Virgilio vive sus últimas horas previas a su muerte, cuando cae en un duermevela en el que se funden el pasado y el presente, el sueño y la vigilia, lo tangible y la alucinación. Dilatada al máximo su capacidad de percepción por su progresivo desprendimiento de la realidad, lleva a cabo un minucioso análisis de su entorno físico y mental que se corresponde en la forma con una investigación profunda de las posibilidades del lenguaje. La muerte de Virgilio tomó cuerpo en las cinco semanas que Broch estuvo encarcelado en Alt-Ausse, tras ser detenido por la Gestapo. Acabará esta obra monumental -que aparecerá en 1945 casi simultáneamente en inglés y alemán- durante su exilio en Estados Unidos. Consciente de vivir un tiempo de transición, y trazando un paralelo entre la época de Augusto y la suya propia, Broch se plantea a lo largo de la obra cuestiones como la posibilidad del conocimiento y, muy especialmente, la función del arte en un tiempo de crisis. Combinando la reflexión filosófica con la lírica y el análisis psicológico, elabora un largo poema en prosa de un barroquismo delirante que desafía las normas de la narrativa tradicional.

It is the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and Publius Vergilius Maro, the poet of the Aeneid and Caesar's enchanter, has been summoned to the palace, where he will shortly die. Out of the last hours of Virgil's life and the final stirrings of his consciousness, the Austrian writer Hermann Broch fashioned one of the great works of twentieth-century modernism, a book that embraces an entire world and renders it with an immediacy that is at once sensual and profound. Begun while Broch was imprisoned in a German concentration camp, The Death of Virgil is part historical novel and part prose poem - and always an intensely musical and immensely evocative meditation on the relation between life and death, the ancient and the modern.

With his epic trilogy, The Sleepwalkers, Hermann Broch established himself as one of the great innovators of modern literature, a visionary writer-philosopher the equal of James Joyce, Thomas Mann, or Robert Musil. Even as he grounded his narratives in the intimate daily life of Germany, Broch was identifying the oceanic changes that would shortly sweep that life into the abyss. Whether he is writing about a neurotic army officer The Romantic, a disgruntled bookkeeper and would-be assassin The Anarchist, or an opportunistic war-deserter The Realist, Broch immerses himself in the twists of his characters psyches, and at the same time soars above them, to produce a prophetic portrait of a world tormented by its loss of faith, morals, and reason.

Marius Ratti, a drifter and Hitler-like figure, arrives in a small mountain village, contaminating it with his virulent, pestilential influence, in this parable of Hitler's rise to power

"Broch'un Vergilius'u, bugüne kadar romanın esnek ortamı bağlamında gerçekleştirilmiş en sıradışı ve en temel deneylerden biridir." Thomas Mann Broch, Joyce'tan bu yana Avrupa edebiyatının en büyük romancısıdır ve Vergilius'un Ölümü, Ulysses'ten günümüze kurgunun teknik olarak ne denli ilerlediğinin tek gerçek kanıtıdır… George Steiner "Vergilius'un Ölümü'nde Broch, tıpkı Proust, Joyce ve Musil gibi, şiirden bilgilendirme amacıyla yararlanmak ve felsefeyi sanat boyutuna yükseltmek tutkusundadır. Bilgiye ulaşmak için çaba harcayan sanatçı; eylemci; öğretici; artık hiçbir görev yüklenemeyen bir çağın başlıca temsilcisi; Vergilius'un arkasında Hermann Broch vardır." Walter Jens