WILLIS VICKERY

Bürger's Lenore

PRINTED BY

HAZELL, WATSON, AND VINEY, LD.

LONDON AND AYLESBURY

This translation of Bürger's celebrated ballad was made by

Dante Gabriel Rossetti in or about June 1844: he used at

that date the signature “Gabriel Charles Rossetti.” On

May 12th of that year he had attained the age of sixteen.

When he wrote it he supposed it to be a spirited and a

good translation: I supposed the same, and continued to

be extremely familiar with it for some years ensuing. After

a certain space of time my brother neglected the performance,

and it dropped entirely out of his thoughts. I heard no more

of it, and probably never, after 1850 or some such date, set

eyes upon any manuscript or any portion of it. No such

manuscript was in my brother's possession at the date of his

death, April 1882.

At last one of the few copies which in 1844 he made of

the translation has turned up. It was included in a sale held by Messrs. Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge, on

November 26th, 1899, and was there bought by Mr. Gilbert

I. Ellis. On its being shown to me, I adhered to the

opinion of my boyhood—that it is a good rendering, far

rather than a bad one. I think it perfectly worthy of

publication.

This appears to be the first translation (of any sort of

importance) that Dante Rossetti ever undertook. In 1842 he

had begun the study of German under Dr. Adolf Heimann,

of University College, London,—a most kind friend as well

as excellent instructor. My brother learned the language

pretty well, but not so as to have an absolute and ready

mastery over it. No doubt Dr. Heimann must have coached

him up to some extent when his juvenile ambition pointed

to Lenore. Soon afterwards he translated the Arme Heinrich

of Hartmann von Aue—published in 1886 (in his Collected

Works ) as Henry the Leper; and I need not scruple to say

that he made a capital thing of it. In October 1845 he

began a version of the Nibelungenlied. It has perished,

much to my regret; but, after the unforseen resuscitation of Lenore, who knows but that the Nibelungenlied (only a

few of the opening chaunts were translated) may also re-

appear? It is rather noticeable that these first essays in

verse-translation should all have been from the German—a

language which Rossetti never knew thoroughly, which, after

early youth was past, he did not in any way keep up, and

which he may be said to have all but wholly forgotten in

course of time. His translations from the Italian—which he

knew very well, and from the most childish years—began

probably in 1845, not earlier than the period when he

ventured upon the Nibelungenlied.

In his preface to the volume The Early Italian Poets

(1861) Dante Rossetti explained his general views as to

what are the obligations incumbent upon a translator. They

amount to this: that a translator ought to be faithful, but

is not bound down to being literal; he is compelled to make

various mutual concessions between meaning and rhythm or

rhyme; and in especial hemust not turn a good poem into

a bad one. In his version of Lenore he has conformed very

fairly to these rules. Literal it most cerainly is not, but it is moderately faithful. He allows himself (contrary to his

original) the latitude of leaving lines 1 and 3 in each stanza

unrhymed and of lengthening lines 7 and 8 from three

feet to four. I myself regard this latter change as a

decided improvement to the ear: but my opinion is not

much to the point. The most salient modification, however,

is in general tone. The Lenore of Bürger is, notwithstanding

its startling and grisly theme, noticeably simple in treat-

ment: Rossetti has largely reinforced it on the picturesque

or romantic side. It may perhaps have been by mere in-

advertence that he turns the religious atmosphere of the

poem, which is manifestly Protestant, into Roman Catholic:

thus, for instance, a “Vaterunser” becomes an “Ave Marie.”

But, if this was inadvertence, it testifies all the more strongly

to the romantic impulse in his mind. In stanza 15 the

translator is wrong in indicating that midnight is already

past, for the clock afterwards strikes eleven; and in stanza 17

the ghostly bridegroom, in saying “zur Wette,” only means

“I wager you,” and not “'Tis for a wager I bear thee away.”

Without dwelling further upon details, I will quote here stanza 27 of the German ballad, which the reader can com-

pare with the translated stanza:—

So far as I am aware, the first English rendering of

Lenoreappeared in the Monthly Magazine, done by William

Taylor of Norwich, and entitled Ellenore. It takes the

literary form of a modern-antique, and throws the period

of the ballad back from the Seven Years' War to crusading

times. Next, Sir Walter Scott, in 1796, published a version

anonymously. He borrowed from his predecessor (not from

Bürger) the well-known lines—

• “Tramp tramp along the land they rode,
• Splash splash along the sea—“

(only substituting the word “along” for “across”). Con-

sidering that, according to Scott's and Taylor's translations, the lovers are riding to Hungary, the second of these

lines is just as reasonable as Shakespeare's “Bohemia near

the Sea”; for where does the sea come in any ride to

Hungary? Scott's William and Helen, as he entitled it,

can hardly be called a translation: it is a paraphrase, put

into the ordinary English ballad-metre, and altering the

period of the story in the same way that Taylor had done.

Several passages here and there are however translated

closely enough. This rendering by Scott—not any other

rendering of the ballad—must have been highly familiar to

Dante Rossetti several years before he undertook his own

version. In 1796 a translation, Leonora, was published by

W.R. Spencer, with engravings by Lady Diana Beauclerc. It

is, I think, barely less faithful than Rossetti's version; the

difference being that, while the latter exceeds in picturesque

colouring, Spencer loads up the then accepted pomposities of

“poetic diction.” The metre is more distant than Rossetti's

from the original; the rhyming being always alternate, and

the lines always of four feet. On the whole it is a

creditable performance. There are also translations by Pye,

the Poet Laureate, and by J.T. Stanley, nearly contempo-

raneous with Spencer's. The Laureate was not extremely

faithful to his original in substance, and not at all in metre;

and I think his version hardly as good as the average of

others. Stanley might pass muster tolerably enough, were

it not that he has stupidly added to the ballad a long tag

of his own, turning the whole affair into a dream. The

famous designer Retzsch made a series of outlines to Lenore,

published at Leipsic in 1840, with the text in German, and

likewise in an English rendering by F. Shoberl. Of all

the translations that I have seen, this is the faithfullest. The

metre is correctly followed, and the diction comes as close

as one could demand. Many lines however are very poor,

from a poetic or literary point of view. What could be more

miserable than

• “What ho! the dead can nimbly fly—”

instead of

• “Hurrah! die Todten reiten schnell”?

As will be seen, all the translations of which I have as

yet spoken were produced before that of Dante Rossetti.

The following two are of later date. In 1847 Mrs. Julia Margaret Cameron (the same lady, a valued friend of mine,

who afterwards produced a considerable impression by her

splendid pictorial-looking photographs) published an orna-

mental volume—her own rendering of Lenore, accompanied by

steel-engravings after Maclise. Between the translation and

the designs there is an odd discrepancy; for the former is

correct to the date indicated by Bürger, whereas the latter are

medieval. Mrs. Cameron, in her preface, seems to suppose that

her rendering is a strictly faithful one, but I can only say that

she was mistaken: she does not stick close to the terms of

her original, and she wholly discards its metre. In 1855 there

was a translation by John Oxenford, a good German scholar: it

is however rather an adaptation than a translation, being done

to serve the words for a cantata by G.A. Macfarren pro-

duced at a Birmingham Festival. There are yet other versions

of Lenore known to me little or not at all: the reader may

perhaps opine that I have already mentioned quite enough.

Of all the translations with which I am acquainted, the

best, I venture to think, is the one which Dante Rossetti

wrote at the age of sixteen. I say it without hesitation, but with full consciousness that the critical opinion ex-

pressed by a brother carries very little weight. Some of

the other renderings—as Taylor's, Scott's, and Stanley's—are

put out of count by arbitrary alterations: the remaining

ones are less animated, less poetical, and mostly less faithful,

than Rossetti's. It may be as well to state here that, as

the Lenore was the first translation of any importance that

he produced, so also was it the first favourable example of his

powers as a verse-writer. His original ballad-poem of Sir Hugh

the Heron , written mostly at the age of twelve, was not indeed

worse than one would expect from so boyish a hand, but no

human being who knows the meaning of the word “good” can

apply that epithet to Sir Hugh the Heron; and another shorter

ballad, William and Marie, which he composed at the age of

about fourteen, is even inferior to its precursor. This William

and Marie , as it happens, was sold at the same auction-sale

is which Lenore was included: it fetched a price decidedly

more than proportionate to its poetic deservings.

In 1844, when Rossetti translated Lenore, this poetic

invention was known to English readers as well as almost any other foreigh poem that could be named: I presume that

it is a good deal less familiar to the present generation.

I will therefore say a few words about the ballad and its

author. Gottfried August Bürger, a very ill-starred specimen

of the poetic race, was born on January 1st, 1748, son of

a Lutheran minister, at Molmerswende in Halberstadt. He

was fond of romantic solitude, and was anything but a

strict moralist. His face is not an interesting one: fleshy,

with round eyes, and, save the mouth, large features. A

professorship at Göttingen, without fixed salary, formed his

principal dependence. Lenore, published towards 1775, was

the first poem of his to fix attention, which it effectually

did; there was also the equally celebrated Wild Huntsman.

Unlucky in most things, Bürger was specially unlucky in

his marriages, three in number. Shortly after publishing

Lenore, he married a Hanoverian lady named Leonhart, and

then by his misdoing consigned her, as his spectral Wilhelm

did Lenore, to an early grave. As soon as he was married

to one Leonhart, he fell desperately in love with another, the

younger sister whom he has celebrated under the name of Molly. The wife, worn out with troubles and mortifications, died in

1784. Bürger forthwith espoused his Molly; but she also

soon died, in 1786, in childbed. (This is rather a curious

parallel to the case of the thrice-wedded poet of England,

Milton, whose second wife also expired in childbed.) Bürger

was still willing to try his chance in the matrimonial lottery.

Before his choice had been fixed he received a letter from

Stuttgart, written by a young lady in cultivated and feeling

language. She professed enthusiasm for his poetry, and

willingness to bestow her hand upon him. The poet, after

making some inquiry, was only too eager to assent, and he

brought home his third bride. But the result was a woful

failure. The lady became faithless to her husband, made

his life a torment, and, in less than three years, had to be

divorced. Bürger did not survive the breakup for long. He

was very poor, he was harassed by a bitter critique written

by Schiller, and everything seemed to go wrong with him.

In June 1794 he died, aged only forty-six.

The original Manuscript of the youthful translator

has been strictly followed in the printing, as

regards spelling, punctuation, etc.

Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.