1672741298 2023 the year of Stefan Zweig

2023: the year of Stefan Zweig

There are no more doubts. After some disputes that ended in court, Stefan Zweig’s work has been in the public domain since January 1 of this new year, for which a flood of editions of his works is expected in Spain, where he is given more attention religious than literary. The panorama is similar to that which opened up on the highways in January 1993, when Campsa’s hydrocarbon monopoly ended and gas stations of all colors and brands flourished in the landscape. Zweig’s work, hitherto directed and pampered by Acantilado—whose extremely elegant books are recognizable at first sight in any bookstore and stand out in any library with their red or yellow stripes finishing the black spines—is copied thousands of times, both in layout and editorial formats. This is an event: Few classic authors have become such coveted objects of bookish greed. Many editors eagerly awaited the moment to pounce on this liberated legacy.

In 2021 and 2022 the monopoly was already broken. Ediciones 98 published an edition of the newspapers almost two years ago without asking permission from the agency selling the Austrian author’s rights, and in 2022 Hermida Editores did the same with Chess novel and complete poems. Both editors argued that Zweig had entered the public domain with Brexit, as the writer acquired British citizenship in 1940. Therefore, UK law will take precedence in the new legal framework following the UK’s withdrawal. According to the Spanish company, we had to wait until December 31, 2022, after which Quaderns Crema (owner of Acantilado) and Fórcola sued Editores Ediciones 98 and Hermida, arguing that they own the exclusive Spanish language rights to Zweig’s work, which has a Agency was acquired in Barcelona.

In 2021, Fórcola published Cuerdas de plata, a bilingual poetic anthology with a prologue by César Antonio Molina, an edition that has the legal blessing of the heirs and also of Acantilado, who has preserved the prose and substance of the composing author, the backbone of his branch catalog and a good part of his income. In the last twenty years, the independent publishing house has published almost all of its narrative, biographical and essayistic work as well as volumes of correspondence and diaries for a total of 43 titles, most of which have been reprinted frequently and are readily available in every bookshop. The latest to be released recently is a suitcase containing a special edition of their biographies designed for fans to ask the Three Kings.

Stefan Zweig at work on a manuscript around 1930.Stefan Zweig working on a manuscript around 1930.GETTY IMAGES

Acantilado’s commitment to Zweig is one of the strongest in publishing history. It was inaugurated by the publishing house’s founder, Jaume Vallcorba, and is closely maintained by his successor, Sandra Ollo, who has headed the label since Vallcorba’s death in 2014. As much as Zweig’s work is liberalized, it will be very difficult that Acantilado is no longer your reference in Spanish. The most popular titles are replicated, but it is unlikely that any other house would invest so many resources and so much love (because that dedication is both passionate and commercial, and there is more philology than balance sheet in it) to keep such an extensive work alive . Spanish readers have become accustomed to associating the Viennese author with the Barcelona publishing house, and habit is an almost invincible force in the cultural arena.

However, there are ongoing offensives against monopoly. The strongest is the one that will undertake Alianza, part of the French group Hachette, which relies on its commercial and financial strength to position itself as a new benchmark for branch in Spanish. His most notable publication is El mundo de ayer, which will be published in paperback with a new translation by Eduardo Gil Bera. You will follow him, but already in the editorial’s fetish collection, the pocket book, Stellar Moments of Humanity (with translation by Carmen Gauger); one volume that will contain Letter from an Unknown Woman and Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman (translation by Isabel García Adánez), and in another volume Chess Novel and Books by Mendel (translation by Adam Kovacsis).

Anaya, who belongs to the same group as Alianza, will also publish a short novel in his youth collection Fear, which will be included in the reading programs of some educational centers where Anaya has a significant market share. Professors of literature are a notable part of Zweig’s apostolate, but Cliff does not work with the student public. This problem could be the beginning of a Zweigian invasion of institutes.

Cover of the book Cover of the book “Stellar Moments of Humanity”, published by Acantilado-Verlag. Stellar Moments of Humanity, 1927 (Stefan Zweig)

In the same month of January, the Avalanche Páginas de Espuma is added, with a demanding edition of Complete Stories, translated by Alberto Gordo. The Madrid publisher, specializing in the short genre, has a number of classics which has become one of its most profitable businesses and Zweig’s prose fits perfectly and we must not forget that in life he has experienced a similar fame that he enjoys in death, arousing the envy of the great writers of his day like Thomas Mann, who could not even see it.

If the booksellers do not resist and the public does not get sick, there will soon be more translations and reissues of the biographies and the most popular titles of an author almost always fashionable in Spain, a country to which it has surrendered its genius from the beginning on. . The first news about Zweig came in 1929 when the Madrid publisher Cenit published Three Masters (Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevsky). Cenit was one of the most important publishers in Spain, but it was also a militant communist propaganda label, so it’s odd that it was the imagination of an author who over time became associated with bourgeois nostalgia. In fact, in memory of older readers, Zweig’s books do not bear the elegant and typographically modern covers of Acantilado, but the solemn and somewhat musty ones of the Juventud publishing house, which placed thousands of copies of Fouche’s biographies, and María Antonieta in the most prestigious houses in Spain from the 1960s.

Perhaps that is why the Austrian author received little attention in the early years of democracy, as young readers associated him with the leaden shelves in his parents’ library. The 2002 publication in Acantilado of the posthumous memoir The World of Yesterday, subtitled Memoirs of a European, revived interest in an author who was no longer as sympathetic and entertaining as he had been in the 1990s-1930’s sympathetic and entertaining biographer of historical figures was , but as a figure who encapsulated European tragedy with his life and death, leaving a testimony that resonated deeply in a society already obsessed with historical memory. Since then, the book has sold 31 editions and is the gateway to the work of the Austrian for most readers. Many of his passages and ideas have become commonplace, shaping political and intellectual discussion in Spain. Our children may see the editions of Acantilado (and those to come) as intolerable antiquities from their parents’ libraries, but when an author imbues so many generations so deeply, he has already reached eternity and will survive all oblivion.

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