Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain: A Conversation & Reading with Translator Simon Pare

Speaker: Simon Pare
Note: Location: Emmanuel College, Queen's Lecture Theatre

Join us for a reading and conversation with Simon Pare about his new English translation of Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, Oxford University Press, 2026).

Mann’s 1924 novel follows Hans Castorp, a seemingly unremarkable young engineer who visits his cousin at a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland; what starts as a brief visit turns into seven years. Simon Pare documented his process of translating Mann’s monumental work along the way—from finding the right words for the sanatorium’s idiosyncratic cast of characters to rendering Mann’s long, playful sentences into English. Drawing on passages that take us from the breakfast room and X-ray laboratory to the picturehouse, Pare will read and discuss his work on Mann’s text, as well as the history of English renditions during Mann’s own lifetime and since his death. A Q&A will follow, opening up broader questions about translation, voice, and The Magic Mountain’s evergreen appeal.

Simon Pare studied modern languages at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He became a literary translator in 2006. He now lives near Zurich and has translated nearly 40 works of literature and non-fiction from German and French. His translation of Christoph Ransmayr's The Flying Mountain made the Man Booker International 2018 longlist, and he was runner-up for the 2021 Schlegel-Tieck Prize.