Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea
Translated by ELLEN FROTHINGHAM. With Illustrations. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
MISS FROTHINGHAM has for the most part accomplished very well a task which is not very easy, as any one may learn who will trouble himself to turn a few of Goethe’s lines into English hexameters so faithful to the original as hers are. Perhaps she found her task the harder from the deceitful nature of the measure used, for if you are strange to it, your hexameter will at times affect to be entirely an affair of the ear, and at others will demand the most skilful touch of the yardstick: in the former case it will be apt to play you false by a foot more or less, and in the latter the lithe and sinuous thing will often stiffen under your measuring-wand until the old miracle is reversed, and the serpent turns into a stick. But in spite of all, the verse has a charm of movement and music under the hand of a master which is very tempting, and which silences every doubt of the fitness of English for it, — “ Evangeline ” and “ Andromeda ” are answers to all the sceptics.
The worst thing about Miss Frothingham’s verses is that sometimes they obey neither rule nor ear, as in this line : —
“ They shall depart from my house, and strangers agreeably can flatter.”
And the best thing about them is that, so far as we have been able to compare them with Goethe’s, they are a very literal and truthful rendering. Of course, they have now and then their lapses. We do not find the line which describes certain vines as
“ Bearing inferior clusters from which the delicate wine comes,”
at all a good translation of
“ Kleinere Trauben tragend von denen der köstliche Wein kommt ”:
for inferior gives an idea of poor quality, and fails to convey the sense of the original, wherein kleinere refers only to size. In another place excessive literality denies us good English as well as good sense, Miss Frothingham rendering
“ Kaum mehr hinaus : denn alles soll anders sein und geschmackvoll”
by the verse
“ Scarcely I venture abroad. All now must be other and tasteful.”
She also, from the same good motive, vexes our idiom with this strange construction : —
“‘May not the threatening heavens,’ said Hermann, 'be presently sending
Hailstones upon us,”&c.,
Hailstones upon us,”&c.,
which is not a question on Hermann’s part, as the reader of the English would suppose, but an aspiration, and the version of
“Möge das drohende Wetter,” &c.
At times the German order has been so diligently followed that we are led into crooked and uncomfortable ways like this : —
“ I will have one for a daughter
Who the piano shall play to me, too ; so that here shall with pleasure
All the handsomest people in town, and the finest, assemble.”
Who the piano shall play to me, too ; so that here shall with pleasure
All the handsomest people in town, and the finest, assemble.”
Yet, with all its defects, Miss Frothingham’s translation is something to be glad of: it lends itself kindly to perusal, and it presents Goethe’s charming poem in the metre of the original ; while its blemishes are those which careful revision would remove. Besides, there is nothing in the order of Providence to prevent any one who is so gifted, from replacing her version by a better, and then, there is always the German, to which this or any other translation cannot do better than tempt the reader. It is not a poem which could be profitably used in an argument for the enlargement of the sphere of woman ; it teaches her subjection, indeed, from the lips of a beautiful girl, which are always so fatally convincing ; but it has its charm, nevertheless, and will serve at least for an agreeable picture of an age when the ideal woman was a creature around which grew the beauty and comfort and security of home.