The Royal Lady's Magazine/Series 1/Volume 2/July 1831/German Prolusions

GERMAN PROLUSIONS.

No. I.

It is only of late years that the literature of Germany has been studied in this country. But though many have acquired the language, few have been at the trouble to give translations; while the difficulties, real as well as imaginary, of learning German, have proved an insuperable obstacle to those who contrive to pick up a smattering of French or Italian in a few months.

The majority of those works which profess to be translations from the German, are in fact nothing more than versions of French translations, badly executed in both languages; and being thus a translation of a translation, it may easily be supposed they retain nothing of the original except the dry bones.

Popular as the Sorrows of Werter, for example, have been in England, there is no translation of it from the German, except one that was done some years ago in the following manner: A German teacher (Dr. Render) turned it into his English; and a bookseller’s hack (one of Sir Richard Phillips’s journeymen authors) licked it into decent syntax. I appeal to any one who has read that touching work in German (inferior only, if inferior, to the Nouvelle Heloise of Rousseau), whether he has ever seen a line of it in English, that preserved the pathos, simplicity, and beauty, of Goëthe? The same may be said (with one or two exceptions, where such men as Coleridge have employed their pens) of the works of Schiller, Wieland, &c.

It is the design of the following series of papers to attempt to supply this defect, and to make the English reader acquainted with some of the many admirable productions of German genius. No particular system will be adhered to, except, that the aim will be to select such pieces as may delight by their narrative form, or by the elegance and beauty of their conception; and of which no translations have hitherto appeared, or the translations of which are notoriously meagre and unskilful. Our treasures are ample. They can fail in being attractive only by deficiency of judgment in collecting and arranging them, or by inability to preserve their original brilliancy.

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