Wordsworth Translated

A Case Study in the Reception of British Romantic Poetry in Germany 1804-1914

John Williams

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441184351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria europea

British writers of the Romantic Period were popular in Germany throughout the nineteenth century, and translations of Scott, Burns, Moore, Hemans, and Byron (among others) became widespread. This study analyses the reception of William Wordsworth's poetry in 19th century Germany in relation to other romantic poets. Research into Anglo-German cultural relations has tended to see Wordsworth as of little or no interest to Germany but new research shows that Wordsworth was clearly of interest to German poets, translators and readers and that there was significantly more knowledge of and respect for Wordsworth's poetry, and interest in his ideas and beliefs, than has previously been recognised. Williams focuses particularly on the work of Friedrich Jacobsen, Ferdinand Freligrath and Marie Gothein, who span the early, middle, and late years of the century respectively and establishes the wider presence of many others translating, anthologising and commenting on Wordsworth poetry and beliefs.

1 The Eighteenth-Century Context

Introduction

I travell’d among unknown Men,
In Lands beyond the Sea;
Nor England! Did I know till then
What love I bore to thee.

Wordsworth 1983, 103

British poetry was widely read in Europe throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was frequently translated, but it was also published to be read in English. This book offers a case study in the processes of reception, focusing on William Wordsworth’s reception in nineteenth-century Germany. Set alongside several poets of his generation, Wordsworth may seem an unusual choice. Burns, Byron, Moore, Scott, and Felicia Hemans are among those whose work appears to have been considerably more widely disseminated in Germany than that of Wordsworth. In twenty-first century Germany, knowledge of Wordsworth has all but disappeared. For this reason alone it is worth rediscovering the interest he did excite in the century prior to the First World War. Researching Wordsworth’s reception in Germany also reveals intriguing and important insights into the interplay of German and British culture during the nineteenth century.

It is necessary first, however, to consider the eighteenth-century context for Wordsworth’s reception. This will be done by identifying key intellectual preoccupations of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in Germany, and then by assessing certain aspects of the contribution which English literature and literary theory made to the development of German literature as it began to flourish in the course of the eighteenth century.

Aufklärung

‘I have portrayed matters of religion as the focal point of enlightenment, i.e. of man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity’.

Kant, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in Reiss 1991, 59

Formed in Berlin in 1783, the Wednesday Club (‘Mittwochsgesellschaft’) was a society dedicated to the promotion of Enlightenment ideals. It was also a secret society because it sought freedom for its members to express frankly their views on the burning social and political issues of the day. Among these were education, censorship, law reform, and the persistence of superstition. The society consisted of over 20 members, including Justus Möser, Moses Mendelssohn and Johann Erich Biester, editor of the influential journal Berlinische Monatsschrift. Though the formal existence of a society was never acknowledged, Biester published accounts of some of the debates in his journal, along with contributions from Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Mirabeau, in addition to essays from the regular German members. Emmanuel Kant (1724–1804) was a founder member, and in 1784 he published his essay, ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’.

Thomas Munck has summarized Kant’s understanding of Enlightenment as being ‘the process of discovery, and active and critical engagement of the individual’ (Munck 2000, 7). Kant privileges the importance of the pursuit of knowledge over its attainment; he is passionate about the coming together of individuals to seek enlightenment through frank and open debate, contrasted with a notion of enlightenment defined by the establishment of fixed ideas and positions. Munck concludes:

Such an approach may at times make for a very broad and inclusive definition of enlightened ideas, complete with internal contradictions and inconsistencies of detail. But it may also help us to recognize the framework of geographic comparison and international cross-fertilisation which was itself one of the most important contemporary sources of inspiration. (Ibid., 7)

Two particularly important points emerge from this passage. Firstly, we note the existence of ‘contradictions and inconsistencies’. The contradictions and inconsistencies of Kant’s text (which fuel a creative tension throughout) are more broadly observable in a Europe which, while it was host to a movement that sought to extend the boundaries of wisdom and knowledge and banish the regressive, superstitious beliefs and practices of an unenlightened past, was also a place where war, generally pursued with ferocity, cynicism, and a savage disregard for any civilized values whatever, was a recurring consequence of political ambitions fuelled by nationalist and imperialist ambition. Secondly, and still relevant to the contradictions inherent in Enlightenment thought, Munck refers to the fact that ‘international cross-fertilisation’ was ‘one of the most important contemporary sources of inspiration’. Looking back across the century from the 1790s in his ‘Letter 113’ of the Briefe zu Beföderung der Humanität, Herder sketched out a roll call of some of the chief English and Scottish writers admired by his compatriots: Shakespeare, Milton, Addison, Swift, Thomson, Sterne, Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, Richardson, Young, Fielding, Ferguson, Smith, Stewart, Millar, and Blair (Price 1968, 168–72). Herder is heir to the cosmopolitan spirit that informed a quest for knowledge intended ultimately to rescue humanity from its social and physical ills. In a similar mood of optimism, Nicolas Cochin’s frontispiece of 1764 for the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert depicts the spirit of rational, secular wisdom descending from the clouds to an expectant multitude in the manner of a Renaissance religious set piece. When set alongside representations of the Assumption or Christ’s Ascension, however, we can appreciate that the process has been subversively reversed and secularized. Fourteen years later, in a similar vein, Fragonard painted the Apotheosis of Benjamin Franklin, in which the political revolutionary casts out worldly error and corruption in the manner of a Michaelangelo God the Father.

This is evidence of the way political boundaries and religious creeds might be construed as provisional in the interests of ensuring that people would no longer languish as slaves of superstition, prejudice, and religious bigotry. For Herder, however, who studied theology at Königsberg University (where he was taught by Kant), as for his contemporary, Johann Georg Hamann, also a theology student at Königsberg, the secularizing views of the French philosophes held little if any attraction. Religion was firmly embedded in German traditions of thought and self-expression, not least because it was the sixteenth-century Lutheran Bible that had provided Germans with a common language of East Middle German through which they might develop a sense of shared identity. Herder’s failure to jettison his religious beliefs prompted the atheistical William Taylor (1765–1836), an enthusiastic advocate of German poetry, to write of Herder in 1828 that ‘His trains of ideas, like gliding fenfires, are seen to shine, more than to illuminate’ (Taylor 1828 I, 41). Language was perceived to be a crucial issue within the debate about how ideas came to be formed and disseminated, and this resulted in a somewhat different attitude on the part of contributors to the German Aufklärung when compared to the secularizing and cosmopolitan tendencies of other Enlightenment thinkers. Hamann wrote, ‘With me the question is not so much: What is reason? But rather: What is language?’ (Berlin 1956, 274). Herder questioned a common Enlightenment view that language was no more than a vehicle for expressing ideas that were already in existence. As Andrew Bowie has pointed out, the fact that Herder is working at a time when ‘there is no real political entity called Germany’, helps to explain how he comes to concentrate (in opposition to much Enlightenment thought) on the dynamic qualities of language: ‘the … ways in which language can build culture and identity’ (Bowie, 2003, 51). In his On Recent German Literature. Fragments (1766–8) Herder seems to suggest that, rather than look forward to the evolution of a unified language of Enlightenment wisdom, people are given the option of exploring other worlds by their acquisition of other languages, and thus have the opportunity of ‘translating’ new thoughts and new ideas into their own cultures. This is an issue that confronted German writers anxious to develop their own national literature as they sought a political and cultural identity: what precisely did they seek as they looked to France or (as was increasingly the case as the eighteenth century progressed) to England for texts to ‘translate’?

This is a ‘translation’ issue that M. H. Abrams pursues in Natural Supernaturalism with reference to Herder and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), another theology student, but one who soon transferred his energies to literary production. In 1776, in The Oldest Documents of the Human Race, Herder ‘translated the Biblical account of Eden, the fall, and the restoration into his version of universal history; for the Scriptural story, he said, though told with a simplicity appropriate to children, embodies the true history both of the entire human race and of each member of the race’ (Abrams 1971, 202–3). In Lessing’s essay of 1780, ‘The Education of the Human Race’:

[he] translated the scriptural revelation of man’s fall and redemption into a secular history of mankind’s progressive education in reason and morality, assimilated external Providence to an imminent historical principle, equated the stages of civilization to stages in the maturation of an individual, and represented the educational process in the persistent metaphor of a laborious journey on the long road toward perfection.’ (Ibid., 201–2)

Abrams links this powerful and complex influence of Christian thinking in German Romanticism specifically to the means by which Wordsworth worked out his ‘Programme for Poetry’; he argues that Wordsworth saw himself as:

… the latest in the line of poets inspired by the ‘prophetic Spirit,’ and as such has been granted a ‘Vision’ which sanctions his claim to outdo Milton’s Christian story in the scope and audacious novelty of his subject. The vision is that of the awesome depths and height of the human mind, and of the power of that mind as in itself adequate, by consummating a holy marriage with the external universe, to create out of the world of all of us, in a quotidian and recurrent miracle, a new world which is the equivalent of paradise. (Ibid., 28)

As Herder, in the last year of his life, turned the pages of his copy of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, what was happening as he translated the poems he saw there? Crabb Robinson noted that Herder ‘agreed with Wordsworth as to poetical language’, and that there was also ‘a general sympathy between the two in matters of morality and religion’ (Robinson 1967, 154). Was translation in this instance essentially the same process as that implied by Abrams when he described both Herder and Lessing as ‘translating’ the scriptures into ‘universal history’, and into a ‘secular history of mankind’s progressive education in reason and morality’?

George Steiner has also discussed the profound significance of religion upon the development of linguistics and the activity of translation. In After Babel (1975) he comments specifically on the way Hamann, in the 1760s, undertook a comparative examination of the French and German languages. Hamann, he affirms, based his method on the following belief taken from his own linguistic culture:

Hebrew verb forms are inseparable from the niceties and strict punctualities that mark Jewish ritual. But that which a language reveals as being the specific genius of a community, the language itself has shaped and determined. The process is dialectical, with the formative energies of language moving both inward and outward in a civilization. (Steiner 1998, 80)

Herder, Steiner goes on to argue, took what he calls Hamann’s ‘fantastications’ a step forward into the Enlightenment, but for all that, ‘the theory of a divine act of special bestowal was never far from Herder’s thoughts’ (Ibid., 81). A religious strand was inextricably woven into a habit of thinking, at the heart of which lay an interrogation of language. The history of the way in which translation became perceived as an imperative undertaking in Europe, Steiner reminds us, revolves to a significant degree around the drive to disseminate the Christian faith:

In the two centuries between the reign of Pope Nicolas and Urquhart’s Rabelais (1653), the history of translation coincides with and informs that of Western thought and feeling. No ‘original’ composition was more creative of new intellectual, social possibilities than were Erasmus’s version of the New Testament (1516) or the Luther Bible (1522–34). (Ibid., 259)

Theology remained a central preoccupation for German writers of the Enlightenment, from the time when French classicism was a dominating influence, through the vogue for sensibility, the Sturm und Drang, the so-called Frühromantik, Romanticism, and Weimar classicism. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), who became Professor of Theology at Halle University in 1804, was a major influence on German Romanticism, combining his fervent religious faith with an appeal to the primacy of feeling, contemplation, and intuition. Jeremy Munday notes that ‘Schleiermacher is recognized as the founder of modern Protestant theology and of modern hermeneutics, a Romantic approach to interpretation based not on absolute truth but on the individual’s inner feeling and understanding.’ He also quotes Kittel and Polterman’s view that ‘practically every modern translation theory – at least in the German-language area – responds, in one way or another, to Schleiermacher’s hypotheses. There appear to have been no fundamentally new approaches’ (Munday 2001, 27–8). However, if students go to The Oxford Companion to German Literature for a brief guide to Schleiermacher’s achievement, while they find a clear statement of the way religion lay at the heart of his ‘Romanticism’, they find there no hint at all of the way the issue of translation is inextricably bound up with the development of his ideas.

There is very little in the matter of the previous few paragraphs which looks compatible with the secularizing Enlightenment vision of the contributors to the Encyclopédie. One reason why Wordsworth attracted German minds throughout the nineteenth century was without doubt the religious, pietistic strain discernible in so much of his poetry.

English Literature and Eighteenth-Century German Culture

‘In days of yore, there were Englishmen here, who passed their time pleasantly enough, and some of whom I remember with esteem and regret’.

Goethe to R. P. Gillies in
Zonneveld, 2004, 326

In the early years of the eighteenth century, French literature rigidly based on classical models exerted a powerful influence over German writers. However, in the course of seeking out the original classical sources, an enthusiasm for the work of English writers evolved. Addison, Pope, and Thomson recommended themselves because of their association with French classicism, and they remained popular throughout the century. Johann Mattheson produced the first German imitation of The Spectator in 1713–14. Luise Gottsched translated The Spectator in 1739 and The Guardian ten years later directly from the English and not, as had previously been the case, from French translations. With the increasing popularity of Shakespeare, however, the hegemony of French formal rules began to fall away.

A passionate debate developed around the relative merits of classicism that informed the evolution of German literature on through the nineteenth century. Luise Gottsched’s husband, Johann Christoph (1700–66), strenuously insisted on the primacy of the French classical model for German writers. He was initially opposed by Johann Bodmer (1698–1783) and Johann Breitinger (1701–76). A significant part of their opposition to Gottsched’s prescriptive classicism was expressed through their recommendation of English literary models rather than the French. Among his many translations of English poetry, Bodmer published a prose translation of Milton’s Paradise Lost in 1750–52, and in the latter years of his life numerous ballads from Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765).

There could be little doubt whose side Friedrich Wilhelm Zachariä was on in this debate. His poem Tageszeiten was published in 1756, and in it he stressed what was by then a commonplace conviction relating to the racial and linguistic common ground between the British and the Germans. The French are Gallic slaves, held in thrall by their grammatical rules, while German Saxon blood flows in the veins of free British bards:

Und warum ists falscher Geschmack, dem Britten zu folgen?
Ist er nicht näher mit uns verwandt, als Galliens Sklaven,
Denen Gebrauch und Grammatik die stäksten Flügel beschneiden?
Deutsches sächsisches Blut schlägt in Brittanniens Barden.

Milton, widely translated and admired in Germany, is described by Zachariä as reincarnated in poets like Bodmer and Klopstock:

Grosser Milton, wer könnt, auch bey uns dich schöner verewgen,
Als ein Bodmer und Klopstock durch ihre göttlichen Lieder!

(Price 1968, 27)

England received many visitors from Germany, including Christian Wernicke (1661–1725), Albrecht von Haller (1708–77), and Karl Moritz (1756–93), while Caspar Wilhelm von Borcke (1704–47), for a time head of the Prussian Legation in London, was one of the earliest translators of Shakespeare, producing an entirely versified rendering of Julius Caesar in 1741. Helferich Sturz (1736–79) and Georg Lichtenberg (1742–99) met with Johnson, Macpherson, and Garrick while in England. Lichtenberg and Sturz, Roger Paulin notes, were of the same generation as Johann Joachim Eschenburg (1743–1820), ‘Germany’s first real Shakespeare expert’ (Paulin 2003, 115). This was a generation ‘for whom English is not a mysterious language read properly by a few, but the essential key to a literary culture encompassing Shakespeare and Ossian, but so many central texts of European sensibility and empiricism besides’ (ibid., 119). Christlob Mylius (1722–54) arrived in England in the early 1750s with plans to write a comprehensive history of English literature, an ambition cut short by his early death. Friedrich von Hagedorn (1708–54), Justus Möser (1720–94), and Johann Hamann (1730–88), were all decisively influenced by visiting England, and specifically the London in which were to be found Pope, Thomson, Richardson, Gray, Young, and Mallett.

The English writers’ engagement with their own cultural history was a source of inspiration to German writers like Herder, Goethe and Möser, committed to establishing a German cultural identity. This was reflected in many of the journals and in works like Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry (1774–81) and Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1779–81) – a recurring point of reference for the Eschenburg generation after 1774 – and in Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (in Bodmer’s translation). Von deutscher Art und Kunst of 1773 included essays on Shakespeare and Ossian by Herder, Von Deutsche Baukunst by Goethe, and Deutsche Geschichte by Möser. Von Deutsche Art und Kunst is generally taken to be the manifesto of early German Romanticism, the Sturm und Drang, a topic that continues to be controversial (see Beiser, 2003); but however the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Eighteenth-Century Context
• 2 Revolution and War: Germany, the ‘New English Poetry’ and Wordsworth’s Arrival on the Printed Page
• 3 Letters to a German Noblewoman on the New English Poetry: Friedrich Jacobsen and William Wordsworth
• 4 The Making of a German Wordsworth
• 5 Translation in Theory and Practice: Friedrich Jacobsen, Ferdinand Freiligrath and Marie Gothein
• 6 Wordsworth among the Romantic Poets in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Germany
• 7 Cultural and Political Disruption: Wordsworth’s Voice in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany
• 8 War Clouds: Wordsworth in Germany 1906–1914
• Bibliography
• Index