An anthology of German literature | Page 2

that I could find,
and where nothing satisfactory could be found in print I have made a
translation myself. Where nothing is said as to the 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 schön. (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 preëxistence 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.