The Earliest English Translations of Bürger's Lenore: a Study in English and German Romanticism/Preface
PREFACE
The present volume was begun as a study such as might have been printed in one of the scholarly journals devoted to English and the other modern languages. The story grew to be so interesting to the writer, and required so long in the telling, that it seemed best to offer it in another form.
The translations which accompany it, illustrating the unusual activity in this direction of a single year, have most of them been long inaccessible to the general reader. Frequent errors concerning them have also been made, and it therefore seemed desirable to print them with this introductory study. To these have been added for comparison the German Lenore from the last edition of the poem published during Bürger's lifetime.
I have to thank in this public way a number of people who have assisted me in various respects. The officials of the Harvard University library have freely and frequently sent me books without which the investigation could not have been made. Messrs. Stevens and Brown, of London, have made me accurate transcripts of Pye's translation of Bürger's poem, and of the text in Scott's first edition of William and Helen. The Rev. Alexander Gordon, who wrote the article on Pye in the Dictionary of National Biography, has placed at my disposal some facts not given in that article. Mr. J. B. Hamilton of Melrose, at the solicitation of Messrs. Ballantyne, Hanson & Co. of Edinburgh, has examined for me the copy of Scott's Apology for Tales of Terror in the Abbotsford library. Especially, too, has Miss J. H. Adeane, author of The Girlhood of Maria Josepha Holroyd, and The Early Married Life of Maria Josepha, Lady Stanley, allowed me to use the first edition of Mr. J. T. Stanley's translation of Lenore, a copy of which is not in the British Museum. This was Mr. Stanley's personal copy from which the second and third editions were made, and contains not only the manuscript changes for the third edition, but some modifications never before printed.