former year.[1] Perhaps, too, the appearance of a new edition of Bürger's Gedichte in 1789 may have turned his attention again to that poet. In any case Taylor began his translations from German poetry about this time. He prepared his English versions of Goethe's Iphigenia and Lessing's Nathan Der Weise in 1790, though they were not printed until later, the first in 1793, the second not until 1805.
It is to 1790 also that Taylor himself assigned his translation of Lenore. In a note at the end of the version printed in his Historic Survey of German Poetry (II, 51) he says:
This was the earliest of them all [the Lenore translations], having been communicated to my friends in the year 1790, and mentioned in the preface to Dr. Aikin's poems, which appeared in 1791.
The latter statement of Taylor is not quite accurate. It is in a note at the end of the poem, not in the preface, that Dr. Aikin says:
The idea of this piece was taken from a ballad translated by an ingenious friend from the German of Buirgher. The story and scenery are however totally different, and the resemblance only consists in a visionary journey.[2]
It will be seen that Dr. Aikin makes no such definite reference as would establish the time at which Taylor's translation of Lenore was composed. Fortunately much more definite proof that Taylor's poem was known as early as 1791 is given in a letter from a German friend. On August 10, 1791, A. M. Benzler wrote to Taylor from Wernigerode:
Mögten Sie diese treffliche Uebersetzung, zu Ehre der Deutschen Muse, doch bald durch den Druck bekannt machen, so wie auch die Lenore! über welche ich mir eine genaue Kritik noch vorbehalte, da mir jetzt die Zeit dazu fehlt.[3]
Benzler's reference to "diese treffliche Uebersetzung," and the later "so wie auch die Lenore," shows that the latter at least had been sent him some time before. It therefore proves, more conclusively than the allusion by Aikin, that Taylor's translation was known to others than himself as early as the first part of 1791.[4]
- ↑ See footnote to p. 12.
- ↑ Poems by J. Aikin M. D., Ld., 1791, p. 41. The last statement is hardly as exact as it should be. See the later discussion. The writer of the notice of Stanley and Pve in the Monthly Review N. S. XX, 322 (July, 1796), who may have been Taylor himself, has this sentence: "We recollect that Dr. Aikin, in his poems published h 1791, has taken a hint from this very piece [Bürger's Lenore], which he mentions to have come to his knowledge by reason of the translation of a friend."
- ↑ Robberds, Life of Taylor, I, 105. The criticism is sent in a letter of Nov. 19, 1791.
- ↑ George Herzfeld notes (William Taylor von Norwich, p. 21), from an allusion in the Goett. gel. Anz. of 1796, that Bürger himself also had knowledge of Taylor's translation of his poem, perhaps through Benzler, whom he mentions in his letters.
