The Atlantic Bookshelf: A Guide to Good Books

Now in his forty-fifth year, Franz Werfel, the Viennese, has produced dramas, several of which have been presented to America by the Theatre Guild; a number of novels, of which six have been translated into English; volumes of poems, translations from the Greek, and those small fragmentary writings which fill out an author’s day. One of Werfel’s early efforts was a translation of Euripides’ Troades. This youthful impulse to portray in German verse the heroic struggle of the doomed Trojans finds a curious parallel in the mature impulse which led him to dedicate his most recent book to the persecution of the Armenian Christians in 1915.