Young Slapsauces and Old Trout: Translating Die Leiden des jungen Werthers

ABSTRACT

Despite the appearance of Goethe’s reworked version of the novel in 1787, the Werther that made all the running in the anglophone world, until well into the nineteenth century, was a relay translation from the French, based on the Weygand second edition of 1775. In this paper I discuss some of the issues I have encountered in attempting to translate into English Werther in its first and most influential incarnation. These include what has been called the ‘instability of originals’ and its implications for translators, and also how the anglophone translator should approach the novel’s extensive adaptation from James Macpherson’s intrinsically unstable Ossian.

KEYWORDS:

• Werther in English translation
• instability of the text
• Christian Friedrich Himburg
• Werther’s Ossian

Notes

1 Karen Emmerich, Literary Translation and the Making of Originals (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), esp. pp. 1–36.

2 J. W. Goethens Schriften, 3rd edn, 4 vols (Berlin: Himburg, 1779), i. This volume — henceforth cited as ‘Himburg’ — includes Leiden des jungen Werthers (without preliminary article) and Erwin und Elmire.

3 Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (Leipzig: Weygand, 1774), p. 134 — henceforth cited as ‘Weygand [1]’.

4 Leiden des jungen Werthers (Leipzig: Göschen, 1787), p. 167 — henceforth cited as ‘Göschen’.

5 Cf. Howard Gaskill, ‘“Arise, O magnificent effulgence of Ossian's soul!”: Werther the Translator in English Translation’, Translation and Literature, 22 (2013), 302–21 (pp. 308–09). The Ossianic passages show a good trebling of the apostrophes, by comparison with Weygand.

6 Die Leiden des jungen Werthers: Zweyte ächte Auflage (Leipzig: Weygand, 1775) — henceforth cited as Weygand [2].

7 As demanded by an outraged Michael Bernays in Über Kritik und Geschichte des Goetheschen Textes (Berlin: Dümmler, 1866). Bernays was the first to identify the Himburg edition as the source of disparities and omissions.

8 The MS has been edited by Matthias Luserke, Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Leiden des jungen Werthers. Edition der Handschrift von 1786 (Weimar: Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1999), here p. 117.

9 Cf. Gaskill, ‘“Arise … ”’, p. 311.

10 His own speculation in Bernhard Seuffert, ‘Skizze der Textgeschichte von Goethes Werther’, GJb, 21 (1900), 246–51 (p. 248).

11 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Les Souffrances du jeune Werther: Traduit de l’Allemand par le B. S. d. S (Erlangen: Walter, 1776).

12 Seuffert’s declared ambition in the Weimarer Ausgabe is to produce what he calls ‘ein durchaus echter Text’ (WA, I, xix, 352), nearly seventy years after Goethe’s death.

13 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther: A New Translation by David Constantine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 19; The Sorrows of Young Werther: A New Translation, With an Introduction, by Burton Pike (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 21.

14 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Les Passions du jeune Werther: Ouvrage traduit de l’allemand de M. Goethe. Par Monsieur Aubry [Philippe Charles Aubry] (Mannheim: Pissot, 1777).

15 Seuffert, ‘Skizze … ’, p. 247.

16 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, trans. by Bayard Quincy Morgan (Richmond: One World Classics, 2015; first published 1957), p. ix.

17 As evidenced, for instance, by the title of a special Forum Issue of the British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, ed. by Sebastian Mitchell: Ossian in the Twenty-First Century, BJES, 39 (2016), 157–311.

18 For Macpherson’s acquisition of the Dean’s Book, see Howard Gaskill, ‘What Did James Macpherson Really Leave on Display at his Publisher’s Shop in 1762’, in Orality, Ossian and Translation, ed. by Gerald Bär (Berlin: Lang, 2020), pp. 29–52.

19 See The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. by Howard Gaskill, with an introduction by Fiona Stafford (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p. 36 — henceforth cited as PO: ‘Several gentlemen in the Highlands and isles generously gave me all the assistance in their power; and it was by their means I was enabled to compleat the epic poem’ (Preface to ‘Fingal’); also p. 215: ‘The story of the poem, with which I had been long acquainted, enabled me to reduce the broken members of the piece into the order in which they now appear’ (Dissertation preceding ‘Temora’). Such comments were not lost on attentive readers such as Herder.

20 See Jorge Luis Borges, ‘‘El original es infiel a la traducción’, in ‘Sobre el "Vathek" de William Beckford’ (1943), https://borgestodoelanio.blogspot.com/2017/01/jorge-luis-borges-sobre-el-vathek-de.html.

21 R. Dillon Boylan, Novels and Tales by Goethe (London: Bohn, 1854), pp. 340–46.

22 After extensive sampling of the digitized Ossian Collection of the National Library of Scotland, I have failed to find an edition which anticipates Boylan’s errors.

23 Boylan, p. 344.

24 Stanely Corngold, The Sufferings of Young Werther: A New Translation (New York: Norton, 2012); J. M. Coetzee, ‘Storm Over Young Goethe’, New York Review of Books, 26 April 2012. Cf. Gaskill, ‘“Arise … ”’, p. 305.

25 The Works of Ossian, the Son of Fingal. In Two Volumes. Translated from the Galic Language by James Macpherson (London: Beckett and de Hondt, 1765).

26 Significant variants from earlier and later Ossian editions are included in the Notes (PO, pp. 415–552).

27 FA, xi, 238; PO, p. 168, n. 27. Cf. Gaskill, ‘“Arise … ”’, pp. 306–07.

28 ‘German Literature: Werther’, germanlit.org: <https://sites.google.com/site/germanliterature/18th-century/goethe/goethe-prose-fiction/werther> [accessed 24 July 2023].

29 In the third volume of Michael Denis’s translation of Ossian in 1769, ‘joy of grief’ is given as ‘Wonne der Wehmuth’, and this felicitous coinage is subsequently adopted by most German translations, including Johann Wilhelm Petersen’s Die Gedichte Ossians neuverteutschet (Tübingen: Heerbrandt, 1782), hugely important for Hölderlin.

30 Cf. Howard Gaskill, ‘Why Ossian? Why Comala’, in Sensibility and Passion: Studies in Early Italian Opera = LIR.journal, 11 (2019), 6–22 (p. 10) < https://ojs.ub.gu.se/index.php/LIRJ/article/view/4666/3651> [accessed 17 November 2023].

31 Thomas Percy to William Shenstone, 22 February 1762; in Thomas Percy und William Shenstone: Ein Briefwechsel aus der Entstehungszeit der Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, ed. by Hans Hecht (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1909), p. 77.

32 ‘Die Gesänge von Selma’ (MA, i/1, 188–95), p. 193.

33 See Gaskill, ‘“Arise … ”’, p. 319.

34 Cf. Colma: ‘Aber hier muß ich sizzen allein … ’; ‘Hier muß ich sizzen allein’ (FA, xi, 234).

35 In the 1773 edition Macpherson reorders the poems, so that, whilst the ‘Songs of Selma’ remain in the first volume, ‘Berrathon’ is shifted to the end of the second. It is evident that Boylan could not find it, since he back-translates the whole passage from the German. Those who simply reproduce Boylan’s Ossianic text here — e.g. Michael Hulse (1989) and Jonathan Ashleigh (2017) — may well not know this.

36 Corngold, p. 139. Cf. Gaskill, ‘“Arise … ’”, pp. 314–15.

37 Corngold, p. 15.

38 Die Gedichte Ossians, trans. by Michael Denis, 3 vols (Vienna: Trattner, 1768–69); Poesie di Ossian, trans. by Melchiorre Cesarotti, 4 vols (Padua: Comino, 1772); Ossian, fils de Fingal: poésies galliques, trans by Pierre Letourneur, 2 vols (Paris: Musier, 1777); Œuvres d’Ossian, trans. and ed. by Samuel Baudry (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013); Fingal: Et gammelt episk dikt i seks bolker, trans. by Ivar Havnevik (Oslo: Solum Bokvennen, 2019); the Chinese translation of Ossian (Nanchang: Jiangxi People’s Publishing House) appeared in May 2023. I am grateful to the translator, Ruocheng Yin, for information about his rendering of ‘gale’.

39 The other two are Catherine Hutter’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings (New York: Penguin, 1962); and Stanley Appelbaum’s dual-language The Sorrows of Young Werther/Die Leiden des jungen Werther (New York: Dover, 2004). Neither makes any mention of ‘Berrathon’; Appelbaum includes in an appendix the text of ‘Selma’ from the 1773 Poems of Ossian.

40 See PO, p. 168: ‘how peaceful was thy brow!’ This is given as ‘wie friedlich war deine Stimme!’ in both editions of Weygand (p. 199), but silently corrected in both MA’s and FA’s text of the first edition of the novel.

41 I hope to submit the completed MS in the first half of 2024 to Contra Mundum Press, New York.

42 John [Johann] Ebers, The New and Complete Dictionary of the German and English Languages, 3 vols (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Haertel, 1796–99), iii: S–Z (1799), 115.

43 The OED (1911) quotes Sir Thomas Urquhart’s Rabelais translation of 1653: ‘Slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubbardly lowts.’

44 For Graves, see Tom Baynes, ‘The Authorship of the First English Translation of Goethe’, PEGS, 90 (2021), 91–108. Graves’s title is The Sorrows of Werter: A German Story, trans. by Anon (London: Dodsley, 1779).

45 [Jacques Georges Deyverdun,] Werther: Traduit de l’Allemand (Maastricht: Dufour & Roux, 1776).

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Notes on contributors

Howard Gaskill

Howard Gaskill is Honorary Fellow in German at the University of Edinburgh. His main publications include Hölderlin’s Hyperion (Durham: Durham Modern Language Studies, 1984), an annotated edition of James Macpherson’s Ossian (Edinburgh: EUP, 1996), and a translation into English of Hölderlin’s Hyperion (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2019).