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HUGO YVON HOFMANNSTHAL
427

language) with but two interruptions for the purpose of trips to Ceylon. He visited the remotest monasteries to compare texts of the sacred books and to converse with Sinhalese monks on the interpretation of obscure or equivocal passages. Often a journey of several days was repaid by the clearing up of one single word. And it frequently happened that the conversation between him and the Indian ended with Neumann more finally established in his own interpretation, while the autochthonous interpreter received instruction instead of giving it. The public remained indifferent to these translations, and the specialists at the universities treated them with jealous disfavour; these were the works of some private scholar who belonged to no university, no academy, no learned coterie. The publisher finally became cool towards a writer whose publications for the most part had not gone into a second edition even after twenty-five years. (Last year, four years after the death of the author, a publishing firm issued in a pocket edition a Shorter Collection of Buddha's discourses; this collection, which was under the careful supervision of the deceased's dearest friend, went through forty thousand copies within a few weeks.) Neumann often had to wait for years before the publisher was disposed to issue another volume of the invaluable works; he utilized this time in increasing and reworking the annotations which accompanied each volume of text. He wove these annotations into a thick cocoon which, if its single thread were stretched in a line, would extend thousands of miles. Countless parallels to the passage in question are skilfully selected and incorporated. There are quotations from the neo-Platonists, the mystics of the Middle Ages and the seventeenth century, acute side-references to products of architecture and folk-lore. The whole 1s like a lecture by a Protagoras or a Pico della Mirandola. And his style is perhaps the best of any German savant since Schopenhauer; for he belongs to this type, the type of the eruditus, and not, like Nietzsche, to the informal thinkers and the brilliant subjective stylists. As I have said, his death was as little noticed by the public as his life had been. After he had already been lying in his grave for six months, letters kept filtering in from foreign correspondents. Among them was one from a large German paper; the editor was requesting Herr K. E. Neumann to give them as soon as possible an obituary for a famous Scandinavian Orientalist who had just died. The friend who had taken over the arranging of his posthumous works and who was receiving his letters was compelled to