[In the following essay, Atkinson reviews Schlegel's translations of Shakespearean drama.]

There is no doubt that August Wilhelm Schlegel fully realized the magnitude of the task he was undertaking in his translation of Shakespeare's plays. This emerges clearly from statements in his essay, “Etwas über William Shakespeare bei Gelegenheit Wilhelm Meisters,”¹ and from scattered remarks in his other theoretical writings and in his letters and reviews.² On the one hand he was acutely aware of the intricate problems inherent in the very process of translation, and on the other his reverence for the complex organic unity and absolute uniqueness of any literary work and his particular admiration of Shakespeare's artistry impelled him to set himself a high ideal of achievement.

Schlegel naturally saw the translator's initial problem and responsibility in the process of appreciation. It was not, however, the obvious difficulty of understanding the intellectual content of the foreign words that he had in mind but a more baffling obstacle. Even in the mother-tongue literary appreciation seemed to him a complicated and exacting task, involving not only intellectual perceptivity but, as he termed it, ‘die ganze Empfänglichkeit des Menschen’.³ However, the percipient was, he argued, at least equipped to respond immediately and surely to a work in his own language; as translator, on the other hand, he was confronted by the even more arduous necessity of making a full and adequate response to a comparatively unfamiliar mode of expression.

Schlegel touched the very heart of the translator's problem when he pointed out how difficult it is to achieve a similar result when using entirely different tools, and yet maintained that in literary translation this must be the aim.⁴ In this connection, too, he insisted that the process was only in part an intellectual one; fidelity to content was not enough; this could at most only result in an explanatory version.⁵ Form, style, tone, atmosphere were, he affirmed, also integral parts of the original and should be accurately reproduced.⁶ In particular—and this was a point he frequently emphasized⁷—a verse work should always be rendered into verse, and, indeed, into verse of exactly the same pattern. The horror with which he regarded a prose translation of poetry is reflected in the term he chose for it: ‘poetic manslaughter’.⁸ Any such arbitrary alteration was in his eyes indefensible. The aim must be to transfer the work from one language to another in its entirety without omission, alteration, or addition in any respect.

Schlegel was well aware that this ideal imposed on the translator yet another exacting duty: the voluntary suppression of his own personality, resistance to the natural and perhaps unconscious tendency to superimpose on the work something of his own, repression of any conscious and, in Schlegel's view, presumptuous desire to improve the original in accordance with the translator's own prejudices and predilections.⁹ ‘Der Strenge nach’, he wrote, ‘müsste man es Nachbildungen verschiedener Dichter nicht ansehen können, dass sie Einen Urheber haben’.¹⁰ On the other hand he was equally conscious that this very attempt to attain absolute fidelity to the original in every respect held its own danger: the danger that in his exclusive concentration on the original the translator may forget his allegiance to his own language and allow foreign elements to creep into his diction. Schlegel stated most emphatically that there could be no possible justification for this, ‘dass es für jede Sprache gewisse, durch ursprüngliche noch fortdauernde Beschaffenheit, oder durch eine Verjährung von undenklichen Zeiten her festgesetzte Grenzen giebt, die man nicht überschreiten darf, ohne sich den gerechten Vorwurf zuzuziehen, dass man eigentlich keine gültige, als solche anerkannte Sprache, sondern ein selbsterfundenes Rothwelsch rede’. And to clinch the point he added uncompromisingly: ‘Wäre ein Ilias in reinem Deutsch, unentstellt von Gräcismen, unmöglich, so würde es besser sein, ganz Verzicht darauf zu thun.’¹¹

Schlegel knew that he was demanding the impossible, that these demands were not only exacting but conflicting and irreconcilable; that in the attempt to do justice to every aspect of a work the translator inevitably lost or altered something; that his art was at best an art of compromise, his achievement at best an approximation.¹² Accordingly he formulated the following basic principle: ‘Es ist für das poetische Uebersetzen überhaupt eine nutzliche Vorschrift, sich bei jeder Stelle gleich anfangs klar zu machen, was durchaus nicht aufgeopfert werden darf, hierauf zu bestehen, und das Uebrige sich darnach fügen zu lassen, so gut es gehen will.’¹³ And yet he also felt that, since the work of art is a closely integrated whole, even the loss of something apparently unimportant must necessarily impair the effect of the whole. Thus he saw the translator in a veritable impasse: something must needs be sacrificed, yet nothing can be sacrificed with impunity. And in any case, he ruefully commented on reading an English version of Goethe's poem Der Sänger, one thing is irrevocably lost and can never be recaptured: the magic of the original creative impulse.¹⁴ No wonder then that Schlegel spoke of translation as ‘ein undankbares Handwerk, wobey man immerfort durch das Gefühl unvermeidlicher Unvollkommenheiten gequält wird’,¹⁵ and that he compared the translator's labours with the labours of Sisyphus.¹⁶ For the Shakespeare translator, moreover, the problems seemed to him particularly acute, since he looked on Shakespeare's plays as works of consummate and conscious artistry in which each detail is significant and indispensable.

It is clear that the existing translations by Wieland and Eschenburg were far from attaining Schlegel's high ideals. These belonged to a different age, to the age of the Aufklärung, when (apart from Lessing who, in this field as in others, was more perceptive than his contemporaries) critics viewed Shakespeare with condescension rather than reverence, or at best with somewhat grudging admiration. ‘Ich liebe ihn mit allen seinen Fehlern’, Wieland wrote,¹⁷ and the footnotes to his translation show how keenly he was aware of these ‘failings’ and how much he found in the plays that ran counter to the dictates of reason.¹⁸ Far from wishing to reproduce the original with the highest degree of fidelity, his aim was to tone down the exuberance of the diction and to remove the blemishes, so that his version of the plays should be suitable for an enlightened reader. Many passages he did not consider worth translating¹⁹ and comic scenes were usually briefly summarized or omitted altogether.²⁰ Eschenburg simply continued the work in the same spirit but with a pedantic determination to translate everything that was translatable. He revised, corrected, improved, and filled in the gaps that Wieland had left. His version was, like Wieland's, written almost entirely in prose, and Schlegel, in his essay “Etwas über William Shakespeare bei Gelegenheit Wilhelm Meisters” tactfully took this as the basis of his demand for a new translation, and avoided direct criticism of his predecessors' work. In a letter to Schiller, however, he was able to speak his mind freely:

Ich hätte das Bedürfniss einer neuen Übersetzung als noch viel dringender zeigen können, wenn ich mit aller Strenge von der vorhandenen hätte reden wollen. In der That, wer das Original selbst kennt, kann sie nicht ohne Ekel ansehn: der beste Dienst, den sie verrichten kann, ist, dass der Anfänger im Englischen sie als einen fortlaufenden Kommentar benutzt.²¹

But his low estimate of the intrinsic value of their translations did not blind him to their historical importance in the task of making Shakespeare accessible to the general reader in Germany.²²

On the other hand he could not find a good word to say of the many German stage adaptations of Shakespeare, which were concocted in the eighteenth century with a view to making his plays more palatable to the modern enlightened public. ‘Die Ehre, die man bisher dem Shakespeare auf unsern Bühnen erwiesen hat’, he scornfully commented, ‘ist meistens von sehr zweydeutiger Art gewesen. Man hat ohne weiteres als ausgemacht angenommen, um Stücke von ihm vor einen gebildeten Kreis von Zuschauern bringen zu können, sey es nicht nur unumgänglich, sie von Rohheiten und Auswüchsen zu reinigen, sondern auch vortheilhaft, das Ganze derselben umzumodeln, ja nicht selten ihnen eine ganz entgegengesetzte Katastrophe zu geben.’²³ It seemed to him little short of impious thus wilfully to destroy the perfect artistic unity of Shakespeare's masterpieces, as if poetic creation were, like tailoring, a process of clipping and piecing. ‘Wie würde man es finden’, he asked in his scathing criticism of a contemporary version of King John,²⁴ ‘Wie würde man es finden, wenn ein Mensch, der höchstens Thüren und Wände anzustreichen gelernt hätte, sich einfallen liesse, auf einem Bilde Raphaels … hier eine Nase länger zu malen, dort einen Arm zu verrücken, auch wohl nach Befinden der Umstände diese und jene Figur ganz zu überpinseln?’

Schlegel's own first attempts at Shakespeare translation were made in collaboration with Bürger, who had already published his prose version of Macbeth in 1783. (A second edition appeared in 1784.) In 1788-89 he and Schlegel translated A Midsummer Night's Dream into verse. At first Schlegel was full of admiration for Bürger's renderings, which must have seemed to him to possess all the qualities of verve and passion that the earlier translations lacked. Gradually, however, he began to realize that his aims and ideals differed widely from Bürger's, and when in 1796 he again turned his attention to the Midsummer Night's Dream he found that he had to translate afresh all the passages contributed by Bürger, and, indeed, much of his own early version which bore the stamp of Bürger's influence. It was, as we should expect, Bürger's tendency to exaggerate and to superimpose on Shakespeare's works his own wild and uncouth diction that displeased Schlegel. In the essay on Bürger in 1800 he wrote of the Macbeth translation: ‘Es leistet durchaus nicht, was es als prosaische Uebersetzung leisten könnte. Bei vielen Kraftausdrücken, und schwächenden Ausrufungen, die pathetisch sein sollen, ist der Dialog nicht selten in platte Vertraulichkeit ausgeartet’; and his conclusion was ‘das Bürger sich zu keiner reinen und ruhigen Ansicht des Shakespeare erhoben hatte’.²⁵

There was, however, one translator for whom Schlegel felt unbounded admiration, and that was Herder. He found that Herder's utterances on the principles of translation—in particular his insistence on fidelity to form as well as to content—chimed with his own. He made a careful study of Herder's translations, no doubt especially of the few songs and speeches from Shakespeare, and was deeply impressed by his unerring appreciation of the very essence of the original text and by his capacity for reproducing it faithfully and undistorted. He never mentioned his renderings but to praise them: ‘Herder hat die Volkslieder der verschiedensten Nationen und Zeitalter mit gänzlicher Reinheit von aller Manier und poetischem Schulwesen, jedes treu in seinem Charakter übertragen’,²⁶ he wrote; and again: ‘Ihre [der Übertragungen] Vortrefflichkeit beruht auf der erstaunlichen Zartheit des Gefühls, womit er jede dichterische Eigenthümlichkeit auffasst, und in der glücklichen Leichtigkeit, womit er sie in seiner Sprache wieder ausdrückt.’²⁷ In a letter to Herder accompanying the first volume of his own translation, he said he would be proud if he might claim to be called Herder's pupil, and added: ‘Gewiss würde meine Arbeit weniger mangelhaft ausgefallen seyn, wenn wir eine Übersetzung auch nur von einem einzigen Stücke Shakespeares in dem Geiste besässen, worin Sie wenige einzelne Stellen übertragen haben.’²⁸ He was delighted when his own versions met with Herder's approval.²⁹

Between 1797 and 1801 Schlegel translated sixteen of Shakespeare's plays, and in 1810 there followed one more, Richard III.³⁰ There can be no doubt about the magnitude of this achievement. Any one of the seventeen plays could be taken as an illustration of the general accuracy and felicity of the rendering. There are no major deviations. Scene by scene, speech by speech, and often line by line, the text as he had it in Malone's edition³¹ is reproduced with remarkable exactitude. Instances of misunderstanding are so rare as to be almost negligible in the total effect.—And yet this is not Shakespeare as we know it. In the process of translation and the passage through a second mind, the plays have inevitably become subtly transmuted. As we read on with the original text in mind, we feel that the range has been narrowed, the vitality and exuberance slightly toned down; the impact on the percipient is less dynamic. We are reminded—though this is to exaggerate the discrepancy—of an arrangement for strings of a work written for full orchestra. When Schlegel wrote:

Dem Genius des grossen Britten
War ich begeistert nachgeschritten,
Doch lockt' ich auf die deutsche Flur
Ein Echo seiner Worte nur,(32)

he chose an apt image—more apt perhaps than he himself realized—for the word Echo suggests the two outstanding features of the German version: a high degree of fidelity combined with some diminution of force.

Notes

1. Sämtliche Werke ed. E. Böcking, Leipzig, 1846-47, vii, pp. 39ff. (Written in 1796.)

2. For one example among many see Schlegel's letter to Wieland, May 22, 1797 (Briefe von und an August Wilhelm Schlegel, ed. J. Körner, Vienna, 1930, i, p. 61), where he wrote: ‘Einem so tiefen Kenner wird es nicht entgehen können, wie viel jener grosse Genius [Shakespeare] auch bey der beseelendsten Liebe für seine Werke und der hartnäckigsten Anstrengung unter meinen Händen verlieren musste’.

3. Sämtliche Werke, ed. cit., x, p. 121 (1796).

4. Sämtliche Werke, ed. cit., xii, p. 140 (1800): ‘Denn die Aufgabe des poetischen Uebersetzers ist eine ganz bestimmte, und zwar eine solche, die ins Unendliche hin nur durch Annäherung gelöst werden kann, weil er mit ganz verschiednen Werkzeugen dasselbe ausrichten soll’.

5. Sämtliche Werke, ed. cit., xi, p. 382 (1799).

6. See Schlegel's comments on J. H. Voss's translation of Homer, Sämtliche Werke, ed. cit., x, p. 134 (1796).

7. See, for instance, Sämtliche Werke, ed. cit., ix, p. 222 (1802); xi, p. 325 (1798); xii, p. 158 (1804).

8. Sämtliche Werke, ed. cit., xi, p. 338 (1798).

9. It was on these grounds that Schlegel criticized Soltau's translation of Don Quixote (1800): ‘Herr S[oltau] hat, wie jeder Uebersetzer von bloss subjektivem Geschmacke, seinem Autor gern das beigelegt, was ihm das Vortrefflichste scheint’. Sämtliche Werke, xii, p. 122 (1800).

10. Sämtliche Werke, ed. cit., xi, pp. 339f. (1798).

11. Sämtliche Werke, ed. cit., x, p. 150 (1796).

12. Ibid. Cp. xii, p. 139: ‘Uebrigens kann nicht leicht jemand stärker fühlen als ich, wie viel auch bei der fleissigsten Uebertragung verloren geht’ (1800).

13. Sämtliche Werke, ed. cit., xii, p. 259 (1810).

14. This translation occurs in A Collection of German ballads and songs, 1799, and Schlegel quoted the following lines from it in his review: ‘As chants the bird on yonder bough, / So flows my artless lay; / And well the artless strains that flow / The tuneful task repay’. (Sämtliche Werke, ed. cit., xi, p. 405).

15. Letter to Goethe, March 15, 1811 (J. Körner and E. Wieneke, August Wilhelm und Friedrich Schlegel im Briefwechsel mit Schiller und Goethe, Leipzig, n.d., p. 158).

16. Sämtliche Werke, ed. cit., x, p. 193.

17. Letter to Zimmermann, 1756, Sämtliche Werke, Leipzig, 1827, Vol. 50 (2), p. 234.

18. See, for instance, his comment on Edmund's lines: ‘Back do I toss these treasons to thy head …’ (King Lear, v, 3): ‘Dieses nonsensicalische Gewäsche hat man beynahe so verworren, als es im Original ist, zu einer Probe stehen lassen wollen, von einer dem Shakespeare sehr gewöhnlichen Untugend, seine Gedanken nur halb auszudrüken, übel passende Metaphern durcheinander zu werffen, und sich von allen Regeln der Grammatik zu dispensieren’. (Gesammelte Schriften, ed. E. Stadler, Berlin, Abt. ii, 1909: Übersetzungen, i, p. 173.)

19. For instance, he omitted the dialogue between Hamlet and Horatio (v, 2) with the comment: ‘Da diese ganze Scene nur zur Benachrichtigung der Zuhörer dient, so wären zwey Worte hinlänglich gewesen, ihnen zu sagen, was sie ohnehin leicht erraten könnten’. (Gesammelte Schriften, ed. cit., Abt. ii: Übersetzungen, iii, p. 485.)

20. For example, Wieland gave only a brief summary of almost all the comic passages in Twelfth Night, and of the fifth Act he wrote: ‘Dieser ganze lezte Aufzug enthält nichts mehr als eine Entwiklung, welche leicht vorauszusehen ist. Man weiss schon, dass die Anlegung des Plans und die Entwiklung des Knotens diejenigen Theile nicht sind, worinn unser Autor vortrefflich ist. Hier scheint er, wie es ihm mehrmal in den fünften Aufzügen begegnet, begieriger gewesen zu seyn, sein Stük fertig zu machen, als von den Situationen, worein er seine Personen gesezt hat, Vortheil zu ziehen. Wir werden uns daher begnügen, den blossen Inhalt jeder Scene auszuziehen.’ (ibid., p. 391.)

21. March 1, 1796. The reference here is to Eschenburg's translation. (J. Körner and E. Wieneke, op. cit., p. 29.)

22. See his letters to Wieland, May 22, 1797 (Briefe von und an August Wilhelm Schlegel, ed. cit., i, p. 61), and to Eschenburg, May 25, 1797 (M. Bernays, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schlegelschen Shakespeare, Leipzig, 1872, pp. 255f.).

23. Vorerinnerung to Schlegel's translation of Hamlet, published as a separate volume, Berlin, 1800. (Perhaps Schlegel had in mind Schröder's version of the play, in which Hamlet remained alive at the end.)

24. This version appeared in the volume Shakespeare für Deutsche bearbeitet, Erste Abteilung, Altona, 1796. See A. W. Schlegel, Sämtliche Werke, ed. cit., xi, p. 20.

25. Sämtliche Werke, ed. cit., viii, p. 136.

26. Ibid., p. 92.

27. Letter to C. G. Schütz, December 10, 1797 (Sämtliche Werke, ed. cit., x, p. 411).

28. May 22, 1797 (Bernays, op. cit., p. 254).

29. See Schlegel's letter to Christian G. Heyne, Jan. 13, [17]98 (Briefe von und an August Wilhelm Schlegel, ed. cit., i, p. 72).

30. The translation was completed (1825-33) by Wolf Baudissin and Tieck's daughter Dorothea, with a certain amount of guidance from Tieck himself.

31. See prefatory note.

32. Sämtliche Werke, ed. cit., i, p. 295.