Phantastes Chapter 18: Hesperus Jean Paul
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St. Norbert College Digital Commons @ St. Norbert College Teaching Supplement to Phantastes: The Annotated German Romantic and Other Influences Edition 1795 Phantastes Chapter 18: Hesperus Jean Paul Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.snc.edu/phantastes_influences Part of the Digital Humanities Commons, Fiction Commons, German Literature Commons, History Commons, Other Arts and Humanities Commons, Other Classics Commons, and the Other German Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Paul, Jean, "Phantastes Chapter 18: Hesperus" (1795). German Romantic and Other Influences. 20. https://digitalcommons.snc.edu/phantastes_influences/20 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Teaching Supplement to Phantastes: The Annotated Edition at Digital Commons @ St. Norbert College. It has been accepted for inclusion in German Romantic and Other Influences by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ St. Norbert College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. HESPERUS OR Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days A BIOGRAPHY FROM THE GERMAN OF JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER TRANSLATED BY CHARLES T. BROOKS "The Earth is the cul-de-sac in the great city of God,—the camera obscura full of inverted and contracted images from a fairer world,–the coast of God's creation,–a vaporous halo around a better sun,–the numerator to a still invisible denominator,–in fact, it is almost nothing at all." Selections from the Papers of the Devil. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. BOSTON: TICKNOR AND FIELDS. 1865. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by TICKNOR AND FIELDS, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. UNIVERSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, AND COMPANY, CAMBRIDGE. TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. A work which has three prefaces by its author may be thought by some to need, and by others not to permit, a very long one from its translator. This is the first of Richter's romances which took hold of the German public. After he had long tried in vain, by a variety of literary devices, to entice or provoke the people's attention, and win or force a way to their hearts for his wit and his wisdom, his odd fancies and his noble sentiments, on the appearance of Hesperus, the siege, as Carlyle says, ("the ten-years'- siege of a poverty-stricken existence" Jean Paul himself calls it,) may be said to have terminated by storm. It was the Hesperus that brought Richter to Weimar. It was in Hesperus, and as Hesperus, that this singular genius rose on the horizon of Goethe and Schiller,–the latter of whom (as will be well remembered) tells his great friend that he has met "Hesperus," a strange being, like a man who has dropped from the moon. English readers may have different opinions on the question whether he "came down too soon" or too late. The Translator seems to see signs that Jean Paul is to be better and better understood and appreciated among us in this free and forming Western world, and he concludes his introduction of this second great labor to the public with the benediction upon the book which, in the closing paragraph of his second Preface, the author so touchingly pronounces on this evening and morning star of his heart. The Translator is exceedingly indebted to his friend, Professor Knorr of Philadelphia, and to his former teacher, Dr. Beck of Cambridge, for their kind and patient assistance in correcting the proof-sheets of his work; and from the keen and practised eye of Mr. George Nichols he also received for some time valuable aid. NEWPORT, R. I. PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. Two long Prefaces follow on the heels of this third,–the first that of the second edition, and the next that of the first. Now, if I make this third again a long one,–and perhaps also, in fact, the many remaining ones of future editions,–I do not see how a reader of these latter can get through the lane of antechambers to the historical picture- gallery: he will die on his way to the book. I report, then, briefly. In this edition such amendments have been made as were most needed and easiest. In the first place, I have frequently translated myself into German out of the Greek, Latin, French, and Italian, and in fact in every instance where the speech-cleanser, with proper respect for the subject itself, demanded it. Once for all, we writers must all accommodate ourselves to the verbal-alien-bill, or decree for exiling foreigners, of Campe, Kolbe, and others; and even our beloved Goethe, however much he too "emergiert" and "eminiert," will at last, in some future edition or other, have, for example, to throw both of these very words, which in the latest[1] he brings forward in the same line, out of the book. Is it not time, now that we have ejected the foreign peoples which had been long enough encamped in Germany, that we should send after them what has still longer remained behind,–their echo, or words? Only let Kolbe, or any other Purist, be a reasonable man, and not exhort us to change the technical words which are the common property of cultivated Europe–e. g. of music, of philosophy–into vernacular ones which will not be understood, especially in cases where the hand of the interpreter would snatch and pluck away the butterfly-dust of variegated allusions. For example, the name Purist itself may serve as an example. Supposing one should call Arndt a political Purist of Germany, and Kolbe should substitute political speech-purifier, or pure of speech, this small conceit would give up in the translation the little bit of ghost that it haply possessed. Even if the author, however, has not turned out such things,–as some philological anchorites do, who, like the windpipe, eject all foreign matter with disagreeable coughing and spitting, and only retain their native air,–still he has at least sought to imitate the glaciers, which from year to year gradually shove down foreign bodies, such as stone and wood, from their sides. How diligently I have done this in the present edition of Hesperus, on every side, may be seen by the old printed copy interlined with the new emendations, and I could well wish Herr Kolbe would just travel to Berlin and inspect the copy. At least I will beseech the German Society there, which some years ago made me a member, to go to the bookstore and see for themselves what their colleague has done, what erasions and substitutions he has made. The ones who have properly sinned the most against the German language, and against those who understand no other, are the natural-historians, who–e. g. Alexander von Humboldt–import thee whole Latin Linnæus into the midst of our language, without any other German signs of distinction than the final flourishes of German terminations, or tail-feathers, wherewith, however, they are as little intelligible to the mere speaker of German as a man would be to a stranger behind him through his mere queue. Has not our inexhaustible language already shown its capability of creating a German Linnæus when we read a Wilhelmi, and still more that true German in heart and speech, Oken? For the rest, the German language will, in general, never shrink up and grow impoverished, even by the greatest hospitality towards strangers. For it steadily produces (as all dictionaries show) out of its ever fresh stems a hundred times as many children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren as the foreign birth it adopts in the place of children; so that after centuries the thicket that has sprung from our prolific radical words must overshadow and choke up the strange words which have shot up only as flying seed, and finally rear itself into a true banian forest, whose twigs grow down to roots, and whose upward-planted roots strike out into summits. How entangled and wild with foreign growth will, on the contrary, after some centuries, the English language be, for instance, with its native but powerless stem full of engrafted word- shrubbery, capable only of inoculation, and fetching back from its duplicate, America, more new words than wares! The second, but easier thing which has been done for this third, improved edition of Hesperus, of course is, that I have gone slowly through the whole Evening Star with weeder in hand, and carefully eradicated all the fungous weeds of genitives, or Es's, in compound words, wherever I found them, which on the very title-page of the Dog's- Post-days was unfortunately the case. I had, however, much to endure in this work. Of the old actions of our over-rich language against itself, too many are attachments upon its real estate, and I was compelled, therefore, to leave many a nested crew of Es's where it had too long been settled, and appealed to witnesses and ear-witnesses for right of possession. Even up to the hour of this Preface, the author of the "Morgen-Blatt letters on compound words" has been waiting, not so much for a thorough-going examination, (it were, perhaps, too soon for that,) but first of all for a comprehensive reading of them, which, to be sure, the scattering archipelago of sheets, like islands lying apart from one another, will make difficult so long as the periodical has not yet run through its circle of numbers. But then I shall hope from the speech-investigator, when he has them complete in his house and hands before his judgment-seat, a thorough refutation or approbation.