[Eric]

I think that knowing something about the context always adds to your reading of a text.

The internet and Google mean you can find a specific two-page article about the mind-set, country or epoch that forms the background of a novel, without having to wade through huge encyclopædia articles or read whole non-fiction books. Because even though a novel with a simple story of divorce and murder will have universal traits, it will be subtly different if set in Bloomsbury, the mining district of Wallonia, or Russia during the NEP.

With Mann, there is probably a link between, for instance, Tadzio, Tonio Kröger and Klaus Mann's suicide, which can be deduced from knowing Mann's biography.

I'm not so well up on The Merchant of Venice, a play I have never read or seen, but I'll take Sybarite's word for it that Shakespeare may have seen Jews in the light of current events.

Once I'd started reading a novel such as Jacob's Room, given the things I already knew about Woolf and had in the back of my head, I felt that I knew enough of the background, didn't need to read any more just at present. On the other hand, when translating the novel Treading Air, I felt it essential that I, as translator, knew as much as I could about the epochs in which the book is set, and the country, and the author. A translator has an even greater duty to know than a reader. The fulfilment of that duty to the reader was expressed in this case by a ten-page introduction plus notes at the back of the book.