Richard P. Stebbins, Ph.D
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
This text was translated and graciously contributed to the Sophie Library by Richard P. Stebbins, Ph.D. This text is copyrighted material, and is used by written permission of the author. Fair usage laws apply. © 2005 i BRUN95FM ROMAN DIARY (Tagebuch über Rom) by FRIEDERIKE BRUN with Engravings (mit Kupfern) [Volume One] Zurich Orell, Fiissli und Compagnie 1800 Flyleaf: AUSZÜGE aus einem Tagebuche tiber ROM In d. J. 1795 und 1796 (Extracts from a Diary about Rome in the years 1795 and 1796) ii Translator 's Preface There follows a translation into English of Friederike Brun's two-volume Tagebuch fiber Rom (Roman Diary) of 1795-96, published in the German language in Switzerland in 1800-01 and here rendered into English from facsimile pages made available by the British Library in London. To facilitate reference to the German-language original, its page numbers are repeated in bold-face type at the proper points in the English translation. AS a general rule, the original text has been followed without significant deviation, although some overly lengthy paragraphs have been divided in the interests of readability. Proper names, though in most cases typographically highlighted in the original, are generally printed in regular type, and their spelling has been regularized to some extent and occasionally supplemented by the insertion of alternative names more familiar to readers of English. Footnotes are those of the original author unless otherwise indicated The Tables of Contents of the two translated volumes are placed at the beginning rather than the end of the respective volumes, and the "errata" list at the end of the German edition has been omitted since the necessary corrections, where relevant, have been made directly in the English text. A comprehensive index to the two volumes, usable with either the English or the German text, has been prepared as a separate document. The translator and all readers of the English edition owe a debt of gratitude to Margot L. Arnold for her careful and knowledgeable assistance in reviewing and correcting the translation. To assist the reader unfamiliar with the background of these volumes, Friederike Brun's text is preceded by a brief biographical sketch from a German Damen-Conversations-Lexikon or Ladies' Encyclopedia of the 1830s. It may also be useful to indicate here the reasons for Friederike Brun's presence in Italy in 1795-96, a time when life in the peninsula was being increasingly disrupted by the military incursions of revolutionary France, a projection of its incipient life-and-death struggle against the conservative monarchies of Austria and other European powers. The southward journey of the thirty-year-old, German-born and Danish-nurtured poetess - the daughter and sister of Lutheran bishops, and wife of a prominent Danish magnate--- had, however, nothing to do with international wars and politics. Motivated primarily by serious medical problems that were thought to necessitate a change of climate, it also beckoned with a more cosmopolitan intellectual life than was available in Copenhagen in those early years of the Romantic era. Accompanied by Carl and Charlotte, the eldest of her four children, and a limited number of servants, Friederike devoted the summer of 1795 to a leisurely progress through Germany and Switzerland. Amid flattering contacts with publishers and poets - one of whom dubbed her "the Northern Sappho" -- she entered also upon a romantic friendship with a highborn, somewhat older woman, the Princess Luise of Anhalt-Dessau, who was traveling with her secretary, the poet Friedrich von Mathisson, on a sentimental pilgrimage to Italy and Rome. As a romantic prologue to the Italian journey, there took place a kind of shared villeggiatura on the shores of Lake Como in Italian Switzerland, its participants consisting of Friederike Brun with her children; Princess Luise and her poet; and Friederike's mend Karl Viktor von Bonstetten, an aging Swiss man of letters with whom she had become acquainted on a previous iii journey. 1 In the volumes devoted to her sojourn in Rome and southern Italy, Friederike tells of further meetings with the German Princess and her poetic traveling companion, whose identities are easily recognized under the half-hearted disguises she gives them. Among the other notabilities with whom she became closely acquainted during her first year ofItalian travel, special mention should perhaps be made of Georg (or JOrgen) Zoega (1755-1809), a Danish antiquarian and archaeologist who became almost a member of the Brun family group -- and whose professional opinions she came to value no less intensely than his personal character. The deepening of their acquaintance is a recurrent theme both here and in Friederike's later book, Romisches Leben (Roman Life), published many years after Zoega's death.2 Other '"dear friends," like "Hirt the artistic antiquarian" and "Fernow the philosophical esthete," together with artists of renown like Angelica Kaufinann, Antonio Canova, and Wilhelm Tischbein, appear and disappear in a narrative as fresh and sparkling as the time it was written. In conclusion it may be remarked that Friederike's text, though nominally based on diary entries, shows ample evidence of having been drawn largely from "letters home" - particulary those written to her brother, Friedrich Munter, who succeeded their father, Balthasar Munter, as Lutheran Bishop of Zealand. Richard Poate Stebbins, Translator lFor details see Renato Martinoni (editor), Il Paradiso di Saffo: Diario del viaggio di una poetessa del Nord nella Svizzera italiana del Settee en to (Balerna, Swizerland: Edizioni Ulivo, 1998). 2Romisehes Leben von Friederike Brun, geborene Munter. Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1833. iv Article from the Damen Conversations-Lexiko~ 1834-18383 Friederike '8 dates: Born June 3,1765 in Grafentonna, Thuringia, Germany Died March 25, 1835 in Copenhagen, Denmark Among those of Germany's female writers in whom a noble femininity is united with the gifts of the Muses, we may with full justification include also Friederike Brun. By birth she belongs to Saxony, although, having been transplanted to Denmark while still at her mother's breast, she began her earliest development and struck the real roots of her being in that country. Her father, who was very highly regarded as both man and scholar, was Balthasar MOnter, Suerintendent at Grafentonna in the Duchy of Gotha. Called to Copenhagen as pastor of the German congregation there, he took up this honorable appointment as soon as his wife could safely undertake the long journey after the birth of Friederike on June 3, 1765. Friederike, when she left Saxony, was not yet quite five weeks old. In Copenhagen, where it was soon realized how well the choice of such a pastor had been justified - and where Balthasar MOnter, honored and loved by high and low, soon succeeded to the highest place of spiritual honor in Denmark, being named bishop of Zealand - the young Friederike found ample opportunities for her cultural development An inclination to poetry manifested itself in her at an early age, making itself involuntarily apparent through the gentle tones of song, in which her innermost feelings found expression. A country residence of her father became for her a paradise. Here, left much to herself and far from the noises of the city and its disturbances, she attached herself to nature as to a motherly friend who became her teacher and confidante, and on whose bosom she breathed out her first tentative songs in trusted secrecy. Even in later years, even now in the twilight of life, Friederike gladly thinks of that time, and of the loneliness in which she then dreamed and poetized. Her heart, so receptive to friendship, formed a lasting alliance with the poet brothers Stolberg and the families ofBernstorff, Reventlow and Schimmelmann. Particularly finn was the bond of purest inclination between her and Charlotte, Countess of Bernstorff (now the widowed Countess ofDernath). Her education was simple, her instruction was not pedantically driven, and did not by any means exclude those subordinate arts of housekeeping, and that economic activity, which the future status as housewife demanded of her, and for which she, side by side with the most lively striving toward higher things, showed a pleasure reflecting her sure tact regarding a future necessity. She read with the greatest curiosity, and since she was given only good things to read, and her good father then talked with her about her reading, directed her attention to its essential 3Published in collaboration with scholars and female writers by Carl Herlosssohn, 1834-38; second, unaltered edition, Adorf: Verlags-Bureau, 1846, vol. 2, pp. 206ff. German text from Internet (Http://www.wortblume.de/dichterinnen/dclbrun.htm); English text and paragraph divisions by the translator. v features, corrected her variable judgment, and sought to determine and form her taste, though gently and scarcely noticeably to herself, such reading was the best guidepost for her in the field of knowledge. In her sixteenth year she undertook with her parents a trip to Gotha, where she made the acquaintance of men like Klopstock, Gerstenberg, Claudius, Jerusalem, Herder and many others. In the following year she was married to the present royal Conference Counselor Constantin Bmn, who earlier lived as Danish Consul in St. Petersburg, and is now Director of the West Indian Company in Copenhagen. She bore him five children, of whom one son died; the other, however, together with three daughters, is happily married. When not yet twenty-four years old, Friederike had the misfortune, on one sharp winter's night, to lose her hearing for life. She bore this loss with rare fortitude, and if the outer world fell silent for her, all the more powerfully did the lute of poesy assert itself within her.4 In 1791 Friederike accompanied her husband on a trip via Paris through southern France to Geneva.