The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
The reader must also become inured, by a course of physical training, to
resist the fiery onslaughts of a sentimentality which was the first
ferment of Jean Paul's sincere and huge imagination. See, for instance,
Vol. II. p. 229. And we cannot too much admire the tact which Mr. Brooks
has brought to the decanting of these seething passages into tolerable
vernacular limits. Sometimes, indeed, he misses a help which he might
have procured for the reader, to lift him, with less danger of
dislocation, to these pinnacles of passion, by transferring more of the
elevated idiom of the style: for, in some of the complicated paragraphs,
a too English rendering of the clauses gives the sentiment a dowdy and
prosaic air. We should not object to an occasional inversion of the
order, even where Jean Paul himself is more direct than usual; for this
always appeared to us to lend a racy German flavor to the page. No doubt
Jean Paul needs, first of all, to be made comprehensible; but if his
style is too persistently Anglicized, many places will be reached where
the sense itself must suffer for want of the picturesqueness of the
German idiom. The quaintness will grow flat, the color of the sentiment
will almost disappear, the rich paragraphs will run thinly clad,
disenchanted like Cinderella at midnight. Some of Mr. Carlyle's
translations from the German are invigorated by this Teutonicizing of
the English, and by the sincerity of phrases transferred directly as
they first came molten from the pen. This may be pushed to the point of
affectation; but judiciously used, it is suited to Jean Paul's fervor
and abandonment.
There is also a rhythm in his exalted moments, a delicate and noble
swing of the clauses, not easy to transfer: as in the Eighth
Dog-Post-Day, the paragraph commencing, "Wehe groeszere Wellen auf mich
zu, Morgenluft!" "Thou morning-air, break over me in greater waves!
Bathe me in thy vast billows which roll above our woods and meadows, and
bear me in blossom clouds past radiant gardens and glimmering streams,
and let me die gently floating above the earth, rocked amid flying
flowers and butterflies, and dissolving with outspread arms beneath the
sun; while all my veins fall blended into red morning-flakes down to the
flowers," etc. But this may appear finical to Mr. Brooks. We certainly
do not press it critically against his great and general success. Such a
paragraph as, for instance, the closing one upon page 340 of Vol. II. is
very trying to the resources of the translator. Here Mr. Brooks has
sacrificed to literalness an opportunity to sort the confused clauses
and stop their jostling: this may be done without diluting the
sentiment, and is within the translator's liberty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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