THERE IS, OF COURSE, a reason why Karl Kraus's The Last Days of Mankind (1922) has only now been translated in its entirety into English. That the play is a masterpiece, albeit it a strange one, is beyond dispute, inasmuch as such things can be beyond dispute. Even Kraus's rival Max Reinhardt acknowledged the brilliance of Kraus's evocation of the reciprocal relationship between Austrian mentalities and institutions— above all, the press—and the Great War: of how they drove it, and how it affected them. But at 800 pages in the German edition, and with a list of dramatis personae longer than most short stories, The Last Days is a masterpiece of unwieldy dimensions. Its size, however, is just part of the difficulty. The dialogue is full of dialect; there is much poetry amidst the prose; and one of the central figures, the Grumbler, speaks a lot like Kraus wrote—that is, with much the same level of syntactical complexity and wordplay. No wonder, then, that it has taken almost a century for English translators to attempt a complete translation (a drastically abridged rendering appeared in the 1970s).

How successful is this attempt? Or, to paraphrase Benjamin and Beckett, how successfully does it fail? The team of Fred Bridgham and the renowned Kraus scholar Edward Timms certainly deserves high praise for their perseverance, and they have done a fine job in managing some of the text's other challenges for translators, foremost among them the poetry, where they often come up with ingenious ways of carrying over rhymes. For example, “Gesicht and Geschlecht / verbietet die Pflicht. / Wir haben kein Recht / auf Geschlecht und Gesicht” is rendered as “distinguishing features / we have to surrender, / for we 're merely creatures / without face or gender.” The character who utters these lines is, incidentally, a female gas mask, one of the play's many anthropomorphized objects that are by turns comical and eerie.

Translation involves finding—and attempting to create—equivalences; dialect is a particularly tricky area in this process. One can try to match a dialect of, say, rural Bavarians with one of the rural American South.