An anthology of German literature | Page 2

authorship of a translation, it is to be understood as my own. In this part of my work I have tried to preserve the form and savor of the originals, and at the same time to keep as close to the exact sense as the constraints of rime and meter would allow. In Nos. XI to XVII a somewhat perplexing problem was presented. The originals frequently have assonance instead of rime and the verse is sometimes crude in other ways. An attempt to imitate the assonances and crudities in modern German would simply have given the effect of bad verse-making. On the other hand, to translate into smooth tetrameters, with perfect rime everywhere, would have given an illusory appearance of regularity and have made the translation zu sch?n. (I fear that No. VII, the selections from Otfried, for the translation of which I am not responsible, is open to this charge.) So I adopted the expedient of a line-for-line prose version, dropping into rime only where the modern equivalent of the Middle German took the form of rime naturally. After regular rime becomes established--with Heinrich von Veldeke--I have employed it in all my translations. For my shortcomings as a German versifier I hope to be regarded with a measure of indulgence. The question of inclusion or exclusion could not be made to turn on the pre?xistence of a good translation, because too much that is important and interesting would have had to be omitted. I should have been glad to take the advice of Mephisto,
Associiert euch mit einem Poeten,
but I was unable to effect a partnership of that kind.
Beginning with No. XL, the selections are given in their original form without modernization. While Part Second, no less than Part First, looks to literary rather than linguistic study, it seemed to me very desirable that the selections from writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should represent the literary language of that time. By modernizing I could have dispensed with many a footnote and have made the texts somewhat easier to read; but that gain would have entailed a very unfortunate loss of savor, and have deprived the selections of all incidental value as Sprachproben. On the other hand, I could see no advantage in a scrupulous reproduction of careless punctuation, mere mistakes, or meaningless peculiarities of spelling. As there is no logical stopping-place when an editor once begins to retouch a text, I finally decided to follow, in each selection, either a trustworthy reprint or else a good critical edition, without attempting to harmonize the different editors or to apply any general rules of my own. The reader is thus assured of a fairly authentic text, though he will find inconsistencies of spelling due to the idiosyncrasy of editors. Thus one editor may preserve vnd or vnnd, while another prints und; one may have itzt, another jtzt, and so on.
Finally, I desire to call attention here to the fact that, while a few selections from Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller are given, by way of illustrating their early work in its relation to the literary renascence, no attempt is made to deal adequately with the classical literature of the eighteenth century. The book extends to the classics. I must admit that the limit thus set is a little vague, and from a theoretical point of view not quite satisfactory; but practical considerations decided in favor of it. To have done justice to the classics, on the scale adopted for the rest of the book, would have required an additional hundred pages, devoted to long extracts from works which, for the most part, have been carefully edited for American students, are commonly read in schools and colleges, and could be presumed to be familiar to most users of the Anthology. As the additional matter would thus have been largely useless, it seemed to me that the ideal gain in symmetry would be more than offset by the increased bulk and cost of the book, which was already large enough. I hold of course that anthologies have their use in the study of literary history; but it would be a mistake, in my judgment, for any student to take up a volume of selections without having first read the more important works of Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller.
CALVIN THOMAS.
Columbia University.

CONTENTS OF PART FIRST PAGE I. The Lay of Hildebrand 3 II. The Merseburg Charms 5 III. The Wessobrunn Prayer 6 IV. The Muspilli 7 V. The Heliand 8 VI. The Old Saxon Genesis 13 VII. Otfried's Book of the Gospels 15 VIII. The Lay of Ludwig 22 IX. Waltharius Manu Fortis 24 X. Rudlieb 32 XI. Ezzo's Lay of the Miracles of Christ 35 XII. Heinrich von Melk 36 XIII. The Arnstein Hymn to the Virgin 38 XIV. Lamprecht's Lay of Alexander 41 XV.