{"title":"Schlegel’s Hamlet Then and Later","authors":"M. Pfister","doi":"10.1515/anger-2020-0002","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"What an intriguing romance: that between German culture and the Danish prince made in England! Among its most important matchmakers was the poet, polymath, professor and literary critic August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1776–1845). Already as a student at Göttingen, in 1793, he turned to translating Hamlet, for him the crucial play in the canon, and he first published his Hamlet as part of his work in progress, a complete translation of all the plays, in 1798. In this, he had, however, by no means been the first. He had been preceded by the poet Christoph Martin Wieland’s attempt at translating all of the plays, begun in 1762, abandoned in dismay in 1766, and completed and emended by a professional philologist, Johann Joachim Eschenburg (1775–1777). Both Wieland and Eschenburg had translated Shakespeare’s poetic drama into German prose, believing that this way they could render the original meaning more faithfully. This was the very point of departure for Schlegel’s verse translations, to whose Romanticism the poetry of Shakespeare’s verse was an essential part of his dramatic works and had to be orchestrated by the translator in its full range of styles, images, and metrical forms. Friedrich Schiller welcomed this as a liberation from Eschenburg’s „dreariness“2 and both the young Romantics and Weimar celebrated Schlegel’s new poetic Shakespeare. Just consider Hamlet’s famous last words: „The rest is silence.“ Wieland translated them vaguely as „Es ist vorbey.“;","PeriodicalId":40371,"journal":{"name":"Angermion-Yearbook for Anglo-German Literary Criticism Intellectual History and Cultural Transfers-Jahrbuch fuer Britisch-Deutsche Kulturbeziehungen","volume":"137 29","pages":"25 - 34"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/anger-2020-0002","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Angermion-Yearbook for Anglo-German Literary Criticism Intellectual History and Cultural Transfers-Jahrbuch fuer Britisch-Deutsche Kulturbeziehungen","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1515/anger-2020-0002","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
What an intriguing romance: that between German culture and the Danish prince made in England! Among its most important matchmakers was the poet, polymath, professor and literary critic August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1776–1845). Already as a student at Göttingen, in 1793, he turned to translating Hamlet, for him the crucial play in the canon, and he first published his Hamlet as part of his work in progress, a complete translation of all the plays, in 1798. In this, he had, however, by no means been the first. He had been preceded by the poet Christoph Martin Wieland’s attempt at translating all of the plays, begun in 1762, abandoned in dismay in 1766, and completed and emended by a professional philologist, Johann Joachim Eschenburg (1775–1777). Both Wieland and Eschenburg had translated Shakespeare’s poetic drama into German prose, believing that this way they could render the original meaning more faithfully. This was the very point of departure for Schlegel’s verse translations, to whose Romanticism the poetry of Shakespeare’s verse was an essential part of his dramatic works and had to be orchestrated by the translator in its full range of styles, images, and metrical forms. Friedrich Schiller welcomed this as a liberation from Eschenburg’s „dreariness“2 and both the young Romantics and Weimar celebrated Schlegel’s new poetic Shakespeare. Just consider Hamlet’s famous last words: „The rest is silence.“ Wieland translated them vaguely as „Es ist vorbey.“;
多么有趣的浪漫故事:德国文化和英国制造的丹麦王子之间的浪漫故事!其中最重要的媒人是诗人、学者、教授和文学评论家奥古斯特·威廉·冯·施莱格尔(1776-1845)。1793年,作为哥廷根的一名学生,他开始翻译《哈姆雷特》,这对他来说是正典中至关重要的戏剧。1798年,他首次出版了《哈姆雷特》作为他正在进行的工作的一部分,这是所有戏剧的完整翻译。然而,在这方面,他决不是第一个。在他之前,诗人克里斯托夫·马丁·维兰德(Christoph Martin Wieland)尝试翻译所有戏剧,始于1762年,1766年因沮丧而放弃,并由专业语文学家约翰·约阿希姆·埃申堡(Johann Joachim Eschenburg,1775–1777)完成和校订。维兰德和埃申堡都曾将莎士比亚的诗剧翻译成德语散文,认为这样可以更忠实地再现原意。这正是施莱格尔诗歌翻译的出发点,莎士比亚诗歌的浪漫主义风格是其戏剧作品的重要组成部分,必须由翻译者以其全方位的风格、图像和韵律形式进行编排。弗里德里希·席勒(Friedrich Schiller)对此表示欢迎,认为这是从埃申堡(Eschenburg)的《沉闷》(drearines)2中解放出来的。年轻的浪漫主义者和魏玛(Weimar)都对施莱格尔(Schlegel)的新诗歌莎士比亚(Shakespeare;