THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
it also for the discussion of political subjects and of business affairs because of its full and precise terminology. But for the discussion of philosophical matters, for poetry, and for familiar, intimate conversation I have preferred the German. And beyond this, I have found that about certain subjects, or with certain persons who understood both English and German equally well, I would rather speak in English or in German, as the ease might be, without clearly knowing the reason why. It was a matter of feeling which cannot be exactly defined.
Occasionally I have had to translate into German things that I had spoken or written in English, and vice versa. And my experience has been that I found translations, from my English into my German much easier than translations from my German into my English—in other words, my German vocabulary offered to me more readily an equivalent for what I had spoken or written in English than vice versa. I was puzzled by more untranslatable words or forms of speech in my German than in my English. It might be thought that, German being my native language, and the one in which I had been brought up, the German vocabulary would naturally be more at my command. But I have heard the same opinion expressed by other, and among them very competent, persons, who had been brought up in the English language, and had then acquired a very thorough knowledge of German. It is a remarkable fact that, although the German language seems to be stiff and obstinate in its syntactic construction, German literature possesses a far greater wealth of translations of the highest merit than any other, while translations from the German, especially translations of German poetry, into any other modern language are, with very few exceptions, exceedingly imperfect. There is hardly any great poet in any literature such as Homer, Hafis, Horace, Virgil, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Mo-
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