🇬🇧"Death in Venice" by Thomas Mann tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a renowned German writer, who travels to Venice and becomes infatuated with a beautiful Polish boy named Tadzio. Aschenbach's obsession with Tadzio, a symbol of youthful beauty, leads to his moral and physical decline, especially as he ignores the cholera epidemic spreading through the city. The novella explores themes of art, beauty, and the destructive nature of unchecked passion, culminating in Aschenbach's death in Venice.
🇪🇸"Muerte en Venecia" de Thomas Mann cuenta la historia de Gustav von Aschenbach, un reconocido escritor alemán, que viaja a Venecia y se enamora de un hermoso niño polaco llamado Tadzio. La obsesión de Aschenbach con Tadzio, un símbolo de belleza juvenil, conduce a su declive moral y físico, especialmente porque ignora la epidemia de cólera que se extiende por la ciudad. La novela explora temas de arte, belleza y la naturaleza destructiva de la pasión desenfrenada, que culmina con la muerte de Aschenbach en Venecia.
Thomas Mann
Death In Venice
Gustave Aschenbach - or von Aschenbach, as he had been known officially since his
fiftieth birthday-had set out alone from his house in Prince Regent Street, Munich, for an extended walk. It was a spring afternoon in that year of grace 19-, when Europe sat upon the anxious seat beneath a menace that hung over its head for months.
Aschenbach had sought the open soon after tea. He was overwrought by a morning of hard, nervetaxing work, work which had not ceased to exact his uttermost in the way of sustained concentration, conscientiousness, and tact; and after the noon meal found himself powerless to check the onward sweep of the productive mechanism within him, that motus animi continuus in which, according to Cicero, eloquence resides. He had sought but not found relaxation in sleep-though the wear and tear upon his system had come to make a daily nap more and more imperative-and now undertook a walk, in the hope that air and exercise might send him back refreshed to a good evening's work.
May had begun, and after weeks of cold and wet a mock summer had set in. The
English Gardens, though in tenderest leaf, felt as sultry as in August and were full of
vehicles and pedestrians near the city. But towards Aumeister the paths were solitary and still, and Aschenbach strolled thither, stopping awhile to watch the lively crowds in the restaurant garden with its fringe of carriages and cabs. Thence he took his homeward way outside the park and across the sunset fields. By the time he reached the North Cemetery, however, he felt tired, and a storm was brewing above Fohring; so he waited at the stoppingplace for a tram to carry him back to the city.
He found the neighbourhood quite empty. Not a wagon in sight, either on the paved Ungererstrasse, with its gleaming tramlines stretching off towards Schwabing, nor
on the Fohring Highway. Nothing stirred behind the hedge in the stonemason's yard,
where crosses, monuments, and commemorative tablets made a supernumerary and
untenanted graveyard opposite the real one. The mortuary chapel, a structure in
Byzantine style, stood facing it, silent in the gleam of the ebbing day. Its façade was
adorned with Greek crosses and tinted hieratic designs, and displayed a symmetrically arranged selection of scriptural texts in gilded letters, all of them with a bearing upon the future life, such as: "They are entering into the House of the Lord" and "May the Light
Everlasting shine upon them." Aschenbach beguiled some minutes of his waiting with
reading these formulas and letting his mind's eye lose itself in their mystical meaning.
He was brought back to reality by the sight of a man standing in the portico, above the two apocalyptic beasts that guarded the staircase, and something not quite usual in this man's appearance gave his thoughts a fresh turn.
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