Novel Translations

The European Novel and the German Book, 1680–1730

Bethany Wiggin

• Publisher: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780801476983
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Many early novels were cosmopolitan books, read from London to Leipzig and beyond, available in nearly simultaneous translations into French, English, German, and other European languages. In Novel Translations, Bethany Wiggin charts just one of the paths by which newness—in its avatars as fashion, novelties, and the novel—entered the European world in the decades around 1700. As readers across Europe snapped up novels, they domesticated the genre. Across borders, the novel lent readers everywhere a suggestion of sophistication, a familiarity with circumstances beyond their local ken.

Into the eighteenth century, the modern German novel was not German at all; rather, it was French, as suggested by Germans' usage of the French word Roman to describe a wide variety of genres: pastoral romances, war and travel chronicles, heroic narratives, and courtly fictions. Carried in large part on the coattails of the Huguenot diaspora, these romans, nouvelles, amours secrets, histoires galantes, and histories scandaleuses shaped German literary culture to a previously unrecognized extent. Wiggin contends that this French chapter in the German novel's history began to draw to a close only in the 1720s, more than sixty years after the word first migrated into German. Only gradually did the Roman go native; it remained laden with the baggage from its "French" origins even into the nineteenth century.

1

Fashion Restructures the Literary Field

Bücher=menge.

Deß Bücherschreibens ist so viel/ man schreibet sie mit hauffen;
Niemand wird Bücher schreiben mehr/ so niemand wird sie kauffen.

Crowd of Books

Of writing books there is so much, they are written by the heap;
No one would write more books, if no one would buy them.

—Friedrich von Logau, Three Thousand German Epigrams (Breslau, 1654)

In 1654, poet Friedrich von Logau (1605–1655) briefly commented on an age-old problem: the willy-nilly proliferation of books. Unlike Logau, others had already spilled quantities of ink on such ubiquity. Gutenberg’s invention had, they groused, made a bad problem worse. Every fool believed his scribblings to merit wider circulation, Erasmus—and many subsequently—had noted.1 The cleverness of Logau’s quick formulation lies in its divergence from the biblical verse “Of making books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (Ecclesiastes 12:12). Many, Logau hints, bemoan the unfettered spread of letters—every Tom, Dick, and Harry’s (or worse, Jane’s) wish to see their lines gathered in a book. Yet those who grumble have only themselves to blame, for these very complainers belong to the book-buying public, and “No one would write more books, if no one would buy them.”

Logau dashed off the epigram “Crowd of Books”—one of his Deutscher Sinn-Getichte drey-tausend (Three Thousand German Epigrams) (Breslau, 1654)—in response to profound changes in the European book world. Like other literati in the seventeenth century, Logau bore witness to upheavals in the field of power in which early modern letters were embedded. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Logau reacted to these changes with good humor, tongue firmly in cheek. Well into the seventeenth century, this world remained small, its inhabitants highly educated and overwhelmingly male. Criteria for membership in this elite were rigorously upheld and consisted, with precious few exceptions, of university training and a thorough acquaintance with past masters, from Homer and Aristotle to Ronsard and Scaliger. The most esteemed among them became elected members of academic societies. But, in spite of the best efforts of literati to police their field’s borders, by century’s end their world had been overrun.

Logau’s “Crowd of Books” provided the perfect synecdoche for the influx of new participants into the world of letters. By the seventeenth century, the book had become the sine qua non of academic life and letters. It was a medium, however, over which academics were rapidly losing control. While bemoaning writing’s proliferation on the pages of far too many books, Logau’s quip acknowledged that the book also belonged to a world whose values ran counter to timeless ideals of truth and beauty. No longer exclusively the domain of the learned, the book by the middle of the seventeenth century had become part and parcel of the world of commerce. Its value could thus be determined like any other commodity; its price was set by the contingent and mercurial preferences of the marketplace.

This marketplace, as Logau’s anonymous “crowd” and nameless “heap” indicate, teemed with participants: men and even some women, whose levels of literacy often fell short of the erudition possessed by men such as Logau. Nowhere was this marketplace more fractious—the collision of erudition and commerce more jarring—than in the case of poetry. Everyone, the literati alleged, attempted his or her hand at verse. Some even had the audacity to see their efforts into print. In Walter Benjamin’s rich terms, these early modern intellectuals considered poetry’s aura tarnished, if not already lost, by its ceaseless proliferation and reproduction. Beyond the small world of the erudite elite, poetry was being transformed into a workaday item of no certain value, a commodity available to anyone of sufficient means. Intellectuals questioned others’ abilities to cull the wheat from the chaff, fine verse from maculature. The boundaries that had tightly circumscribed the academic arena of poetry’s production and distribution had grown distressingly porous. Members of poetry’s traditional elite were eager to shore up the lines of demarcation—and their own status—in a landscape whose terrain shifted under their feet.

This transformation of the early modern literary field of power is particularly legible in the pages of the poetic handbooks written and published over the course of the century. As a genre in the vernacular, “rule poetics” (Regelpoetik) first flourished and then rapidly multiplied in German after the unprecedented, surprise success of Martin Opitz’s Buch der Deutschen Poeterey (1624).2 Alight with patriotic fervor, Opitz (1597–1639) had urged fellow Germans to cultivate their native tongue, refining its lyric capacity. German, Opitz argued, countering strong opinions to the contrary, was no less a poetic language than the French for which Ronsard had labored so tirelessly in the previous century to promote as a language equal to Petrarch’s Italian or even Latin. Like the French, Germans must learn to imitate classical poetic models, importing them into the vernacular.

But the vernacularization of poetry preached by Opitzian acolytes brought mixed blessings. When it was mixed with the black arts of the printer, vernacular poetry easily escaped the rarified circles of the highly literate and slid into the fractious pell-mell of the marketplace. Handbooks, of which Opitz’s remains by far the best-known German example, had to navigate a perilous course. Seeking to elevate the status of vernacular poetry, these vade mecums claimed that it was a divine gift, equal in stature to Latinate, Greek, or even Hebrew poetry.3 At the same time, these guides laid bare the rules for its creation, rendering its composition increasingly transparent and accessible. Such handbooks aimed to tutor a wide range of would-be poets, some more divinely inspired than others. Examples of these handbooks encompassed full-blown prosodies and sophisticated meditations on the nature of verse versus prose; others included comparative histories of poetry in the various vernaculars; some introduced poetic forms and the niceties of scansion; still others contented themselves with providing handy rhyming dictionaries. As a genre, the Regelpoetik captures the inherent paradoxes of the seventeenth-century literary field: it promoted vernacular poetry while ridiculing vernacular poets; it took inspiration from models in other vernaculars while resenting foreign superiority.

The proliferation of this new, internally conflicted genre also suggests a surge in demand for poetry. Verse—and versifiers—had become fashionable. It was the insurgence of fashion into the literary field, this chapter explains, that first transformed poetry from a learned pursuit to one enjoyed by men and women beyond the ivory tower and the academic societies. And the alchemy worked by fashion on poetry caused additional metamorphoses. As poetry won new writers and readers, poetic forms too—including some in prose—proliferated. Fashion, at first enjoyed by a small elite, soon bred popularity. With popularity came, of course, contempt.

From Opitz in Silesia to Thomas Browne (1605–1682) in Leiden and Oxford, scholars across Europe decried the popularization of poetry. In his Religio medici, for example, Browne wished “to condemne to the fire those swarms and millions of Rhapsodies, begotten only to distract and abuse the weaker judgements of Scholars, and to maintaine the Trade and Mystery of Typographers” (qtd. in Köppenfels 209). Poetry and letters, these men recognized, had become commodified. Writers active across Europe in the decades around 1700 were only too well aware that they brought goods to market. In a typically unconcerned remark, philosopher Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) congratulated himself that “die Buchführer kommen und überbiethen immer einer den anderen/ und geben mir noch die besten Worte dazu/ daß ich ihnen für andern mein Werckgen in Verlag geben wolle” (qtd. in Wittman 103). (Publishers approach me and outbid one another, saying the nicest things if I will only reward them with my next little work.) Less well-known and financially less-successful writers also approached the book market as a place to earn quick money, whether honoraria paid by publishers in exchange for speedy translations or compilations, or commissions to celebrate memorable occasions. Grub Street proliferated in publishing centers across Europe, from London to Leipzig.

While university students in particular won infamy for their willingness to oblige any segment of market demand, more established academics were similarly loath to miss out on money to be made, a fact captured in Johann Burckhard Mencke’s (1674–1732) De charlataneria eruditorum (1715), translated into German as Die Marcktschreyerey der Gelehrten (Intellectuals Hawking Their Wares at Market).4 Selimantes (Christoph Gottlieb Wend), most famous today as Telemann’s librettist, chose in 1729 to call his latest lyric collection simply Poetische Waaren (Poetical Wares). While literary history long relegated the lustre of lucre to its margins, we increasingly insist on considering money’s role in the creation of the institutions necessary for the invention of modern literature. Financial concerns stood squarely in the middle of the century’s writerly activities—despite most men’s unwillingness to display the candor of Thomasius.5

Guesses about numbers of seventeenth-century readers differ radically.6 Alberto Martino influentially estimated the reading public for what is today called German baroque literature to be at century’s end a mere five thousand people. Martin Welke, one of the few experts on the early modern newspaper, has argued for a considerably larger number of German readers who skimmed the monthly, weekly, or daily news, arriving at a figure of 250,000 buyers for the fifty to sixty German newspapers that appeared regularly by the last third of the century.7 Each purchaser presumably passed his or her paper on to ten or more other readers—all in all a far higher figure than we are accustomed to estimate for the German-language market.8 Disputing the view that the seventeenth century’s violent tumult curbed the growth of the book market, Johannes Weber has amplified Welke’s call to reconsider the size of the German reading public, insisting that we understand the long war not only as a hindrance to publishing but also as a “mentor” to the print industry, helping news sheets to “bloom in every corner and quickly mature.” The war created demand for news, or, as Weber states, “Europe became small at this time, or better: it drew dangerously close together” (“Deutsche Presse” 144).

The creation of this market for print novelties—fashionable poetic forms in verse and prose, newspapers and journals—ended the exclusive reign of the literati over the book in the decades around 1700. Subsequently, the book would no longer be a curiosity intended only for an elite few. Rendered fashionable commodities, poetry and the world of the book grew in demand. Baptized a thing of fashion, the book’s popularization gained momentum over the eighteenth century with the spread of new forms, the novel chief among them. As the book slipped its academic confines, the market for letters finally segmented into high and low with the eventual creation of the thoroughly modern, Romantic category of literature.

This chapter traces the polemics about poetry and fashion that raged throughout the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century and profoundly shaped the literary field. It foregrounds one novel, fashionable genre: the internally conflicted vernacular poetic handbook. The vitriol on display there is unmistakable. From our vantage point, removed from the battlefield by more than three centuries, the jabs and pokes are often quite funny. Those directly stung by the barbs must have found it somewhat harder to laugh. This chapter surveys only some of the poisoned darts from the 1620s to the beginning of the next century, roughly from Opitz to Magnus Daniel Omeis (1646–1708), the last notable Präses (President) of Nuremberg’s influential poetic society, the Pegnesischer Blumenorden (Order of Flowers on the Pegnitz). But before discussing these men and the parvenus they decry, we first turn briefly to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the literary field to adapt it for the early modern world of letters. An excursus into the birth of fashion, commodity culture, and the world of goods then provides a bridge to the exploration of seventeenth-century poetic handbooks, fashion’s arrival in the world of letters, and educated Germans’ allegations that not all who imitated were poets.

The World of Letters and the Literary Field

In the afterglow of successive category crises, literature stands revealed as a modern invention. Today, its historical moment may or may not have passed. But in the seventeenth century, literature did not exist. Alvin Kernan has nicely explained its absence in his book on Samuel Johnson and eighteenth-century English print culture:

‘Literature’ is the correct historical term for the print-based romantic literary system centering on the individual creative self, that extended from the late eighteenth century to the present, passing through a succession of modes such as high romanticism, symbolism, modernism, and now, we are frequently told, a last ‘deconstructive’ phase that is said to mark the death of literature, though not, presumably, the end of some kind...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Fashion Restructures the Literary Field
• 2. Curing the French Disease
• 3. 1688: The Roman Becomes Both Poetical and Popular
• 4. 1696: Bringing the Roman to Market
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index