An Unoriginal Modernity: The Novelist-Translator Friedrich von Oertel

Summary

THE NOVELIST AND TRANSLATOR Friedrich Benedikt von Oertel, aka “Theophilus Speck” (November 16, 1764–October 27, 1807) was a member of the minor Saxon gentry who owned a small property in Belgershain near Leipzig. Over thirty publications, mostly comprising multiple volumes, either contain Oertel's name on the title page or have been ascribed to him through other means. Between 1789 and 1794 he authored eight original novels; over the next decade he published another twenty in translation (thirteen titles from English, seven from French). Though he also published a book of poems and two philosophical tracts, Oertel's mainstay was the novel, of which ample evidence survives, with some 4,500 pages of original and 13,500 pages of translated fiction attributable to him.

Such productivity was, of course, not unusual during an era in which German-language book production was growing exponentially. Yet despite a culture of literary reviewing whose expansion kept pace with book production, Oertel's work went mostly unnoticed in the press. Ever aware of his second-tier status, Oertel constructed an identity as a sort of professional epigone. This essay reads his novels as practicing various modes of annotation, imitation, paraphrase, parody, pastiche, and summary, all modes affiliated with the “unoriginal” discourse of translation within which he would establish his literary identity. The process by which he arrived at that identity can be traced in his letters to his close literary associate Jean Paul, where he made hay of his obscurity in relation to Jean Paul's emergent reputation. Thus he linked his own carefully curated development as a writer to a suspicion of celebrity. Oertel's enthusiasm for Jean Paul aligned him, by the mid-1790s, against the most popular writers of the day, Goethe and Kotzebue. Jean Paul's growing fame lent grist to the mill, authorizing Oertel's self-presentation as a Cowperian recluse enjoying “mein RURAL RETIREMENT,” as though he were clinging to an ideal of independence associated with the English gentry. Allusions, like this one, to contemporary English writing were certain to win the affection of Jean Paul, perhaps the only first-tier German writer of his age to admit eighteenth-century British literature, especially Sterne and Swift, as his principal source of inspiration. Becoming the leading translator of new English novels circa 1800, Oertel would see the problems of translation differently than those representatives of Weimar Klassik whose remarks on translation generally address the ancients and/or the question of re-translation.