The contributors compare pioneering eighteenth-century translations from English to German of canonical texts against the backdrop of these guiding questions. Several seminal critical works were shared in common, and the collaborators were afforded the option of writing in English or German, depending on their linguistic preference. I opted to pen the Introduction in English mainly to open up the survey to as many Shakespeare aficionados as possible without limiting the audience to just German speakers. For all German (and French) titles and quotations cited in the main text, I provide English translations, unless the meaning is readily obvious from the specific context. The same procedure was followed by the other essay in English. An abstract of the argument in English precedes each of the chapters.
Given the wide scope of material on Shakespeare reception in German, we could obviously not include all translators or all of Shakespeare’s major plays.
Thus, this volume offers select, paradigmatic examples of seminal nodal points in translation and cultural-transfer practice avant la lettre, so to speak, a kind of “Mentalübersetzung” (mental translation) to use Herderean terminology or of transculturality, as related to Shakespeare reception especially in the second half of the eighteenth century. Till Kinzel presents a pointed analysis of the significance of J.J. Eschenburg’s Shakespeare as a marker of a wide-ranging shift in aesthetic sensitivities. Long overshadowed by the simultaneous August Wilhelm Schlegel translation, Eschenburg’s efforts are shown to be foundational and of lasting value. The Shakespearean plays foregrounded in the following as paradigmatic of the aesthetic challenges translators such as Eschenburg (and his predecessor C.M. Wieland) faced include some of the Briton’s most enduring accomplishments.
The highly innovative and foundational phase of Shakespeare reception between ca. 1760 and 1830 was powerfully drawn to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Henry iv, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Richard iii, Romeo and Juliet, and The Tempest. Monika Nenon traces, for instance, the early reception of Hamlet within the framework of Enlightenment theater reform, while Astrid Dröse unfolds Schiller’s reworking of Macbeth remolded according to his Classical Weimar sensibilities and the needs of the Weimar stage, Lisa Beesely compares and contrasts the two seminal verse translations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Wieland and Schlegel/D. Tieck, and Johanna Hörnig unravels Dorothea Tieck’s Sommernachtstraum within the Romantic aesthetic with emphasis on the particular role of the devout female translator. The long shelf life of these plays into the twentieth century and beyond is not surprising.
The chapter by Curtis Maughan demonstrates, for example, how Gerhart Hauptmann’s idiosyncratic reworking of Hamlet over many years altered received notions of the prince in light of the Zeitgeist of the early part of the tumultuous twentieth century without doing a disservice to Shakespeare’s original. His is an example of the continuity of cultural-transfer conceptions from Goethe’s seminal Hamlet commentary to his own reflections on the Danish prince. The canonical figure invites a creative response aimed at completing the character’s inherent essence that is analogous to the Belvedere Torso’s. The latter invites the viewer to complete its intuited, essential form.
The later reworking of Hamlet and Titus Andronicus serve as a useful foil for assessing the true value of the early formative phase of Shakespeare reception in Germany and prompt a careful look at what cultural transfer entailed around 1800 and how it can be viewed 100+ years later when Shakespeare had long been incorporated into the German theater scene and literary canon. The chapters by Maughan and Nilsson illuminate the outer contours of what James Joyce called the “Shapesphere” in a cultural rather than purely accumulative sense; that is, he meant the agonistic arena of Shakespeare reception with its coordinates of original Shakespearean work, its culturally modified value, and its striking commodification.
While Joyce did not intend to connote positive developments with his word choice, his coinage functions in the following more in tune with the geometrical “shape sphere,” the points on which represent central, triangular configurations on the surface with the same internal angles in a dynamical system. Mathematicians Leonard Euler and Joseph-Louis Lagrange calculated the central configurations in the eighteenth century. Moreover, in his prize-winning essay of 1772, Essai sur le Problème des Trois Corps (Essay on the Three-Body Problem), Lagrange applied a similar concept to designate five points of relative stability in calculating the three-body problem to explain how a small mass (moon) can orbit in a stable pattern with two larger masses (earth, sun) in motion. By analogy, the “Shapesphere” and cultural transfer as they are to be understood in the following, designate how a particular Shakespearean work is measured (1) against its culture of origin and (2) how its translation into a new “host” culture is modulated by centrifugal and centripetal forces. Such a system is “hybrid.”
Modern cultures are very much interconnected with one another like moving bodies in a gravitational field. The act of translation represents the metaphorical gravitational force field that brings the foreign body into play with another emergent one (that is, the translation itself), whereby the translator and, ultimately, also the reader and/or spectator enter into dialogue with the
To help weld the individual contributions together cogently as inherently related chapters of a single-focus monograph rather than an eclectic collection of idiosyncratic reviews, the introduction outlines the network of confluences which the individual chapters negotiate. A number of those chapters also include insightful framing information. I am grateful to the contributors for their patience and readiness to respond productively to my repeated editorial prodding.
John A. McCarthy
Portland or, August 2017