SOURCE: "Death and the Dichter," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXV, No. 14, September 27, 1988, pp. 34-6.

In the following review, Bayley discusses two later translations of works by Musil.

The German term Dichter is not at all readily translatable. It has a wider sense than "poet," and a more transcendental one than "writer." Goethe, the archetypal Dichter, created masterpieces in every genre, but was also the model of thinking and being, in the science and ethic of a civilized state. Never much like its English, French, or Russian counterpart, the German novel, coming from the pen of a Dichter, has always more resembled an enterprise of the philosophical imagination.

Frank Kermode gave this interpretation of Dichtung when he spoke of its "elaborate attempts to use fiction for its true purposes, the discovery and registration of the human world." That might mean much or little. A modest...