Blackwood's Magazine/Volume 14/Issue 80/Popular Tales of the Northern Nations

by John Gibson Lockhart

POPULAR TALES OF THE NORTHERN NATIONS.^[1]

This publication has much disappointed us. It will do a great deal more harm than good to the popularity of German literature here. In general, very indifferent pieces are selected, while scores and scores innumerable of exquisite things of the same species are omitted. Who could trouble himself with doing into English such perfect trash as “the Sorcerers,” “the Victim of Priestcaft,” &c. &c. &c. while so many dozens of really excellent little stories of diablerie remain untouched—the whole works, to say no more, of Herr Hoffman?

We would earnestly recommend it to our worthy friend Bohte (a most spirited and most useful bookseller he is,) to have the few good stories in this collection cut out, and published by themselves in a single volume. At present, the proportion of Balaam is at least three to one, which is more than is sufferable even in periodicals, to say nothing of a book which ought to be, and which might so easily be, made a standard one. It will cost him the less trouble to do this, that, we know not by what accident, the best of his stories are also out of sight the best translated. The Fatal Marksman, the Collier’s Family, the Bottle-Imp,^[2] and the Spectre Barber, are, comparatively speaking, done as they deserved to be; while, throughout the greater proportion of these three volumes, miserable, bald, and even grammarless English, is employed in the setting forth of what, even in the German, was bad enough in all conscience.

Nothing gives us more pain (talking of small matters) than to see a really good book ill translated; and of late the English translations from the German prose-writers have been, for the most part, wretched. “Sintram und Seine Gefährten,” is, in La Motte Fouqué’s language, one of the finest romances in the world—a thing equal to Vathek, and praise could scarcely go farther. But, in the version published in London a year or two ago, (by Ollier, we think,) it is a perfect horror; and we believe nobody has ever read five pages of it on end. The knowledge of German is now so very common an accomplishment, that such people as Ollier or Bohte need not surely be at any loss to find out fit hands for any undertaking of this sort.

We are happy to see Messrs Oliver and Boyd announce a forthcoming version of Goëthe’s Willelm Meister; this is the true plan. Don’t give us any of the minors until the really great authors are exhausted.

A good translation of Goëthe’s “Life of Himself” would be an excellent speculation. To say nothing of the great poet himself, the lights it affords of common German life of all kinds would render that book a most acceptable present to the English public. It would do more to gratify curiosity than ten new books of travels in Germany, written by any Englishman, however accomplished. It ought, however, to be accompanied with notes.

We have not seen the translation of Cassanova’s Life. Of the extraordinary talent shewn in that work there can be but one opinion; but we confess we should think it almost impossible to make anything of it for the English public of this time—it being about five hundred times worse than Don Juan, both in the article of blasphemy and in that of indecency—Five hundred?—we should rather say five thousand. A volume of extracts, however, is perhaps all that has been done; and, if so, it may be as it should be.

The little book published last winter, “German Nursery Tales, with etchings by Cruikshank,” was executed in a style very superior to that of the present work. The translator, whoever he be, displayed a great deal of tact in transferring these stories with so much of their native naiveté; he must be a very different sort of person from those who had the chief concern in these “Popular Tales and Romances”—if indeed the whole fault has not been utter laziness and haste, which may very probably be the case; and, if so, why, the more shame. Altogether, it is by no means a creditable concern—for anybody but the bookseller who started the idea. We wish him more luck the next time, for he deserves it.

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1. Popular Tales of the Northern Nations. In 3 vols. London. Simpkin and Marshall, and J. Bohte. 1823.
2. An ill-chosen title, by the way, and no version at all, of “Der Galgen mannlein.”