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Talvj's Correspondence with James Gates Percival
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2017
Extract
The Purpose of this paper is to fill out, with items found in the United States, the portion of Professor Max Vasmer's chronicle, “Bausteine zur Geschichte der deutsch-slavischen geistigen Beziehungen, I,” published in the Proceedings of the Berlin Academy of Sciences for 1939, which deals with the German translator Talvj.
The Bausteine of Professor Vasmer's study are, of course, the members of the first, and so far the greatest, generation of European scholars and men of letters, German and Slav, to take a serious interest in Slavic matters, especially in Slavic philology, antiquities, and and folk poetry. To this generation, it is unnecessary to point out, belonged on the Slavic side such figures as Dobrovský and Kopitar, Šafařík and Karadjich, on the German the brothers Grimm, the historian von Ranke, and even Goethe himself.
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- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1944
References
1 Abhandlungen der Preussischen Akademie der Wissensckaften, Berlin, Phil.-Hist. Klassc, 1939, i–xliv and 168 pp., with Indexes by Elsa Vasmer.
2 Therese Albertine Louise von Jakob (1797–1870). There is no good biography of this woman. The standard work by Irma Voigt, The Life and Works of Mrs. Therese Robinson (Urbana, 1913), 148 pp., is inadequate, being written from the German-American point of view. To the bibliography of Talvj's works appended to this, pp. 145–147, must be added the following items: “Slavic Popular Poetry,” North American Review, XLIII, (July 1836), 85–120; “Romaic Popular Poetry,” ibid. (Oct., 1836), 337–356. “Spanish Popular l'ottry,” ibid., LIV (Apr., 1842), 419–446. There are undoubtedly many more items yet undiscovered which should be credited to her.
3 (a) Sitzungsberichle der Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna, 1883, CIII, 462–489; (b) Goethe Jahrbuch, 1891, pp. 33–37; (c) Prcussische Jahrbücher, 1894, LXXVII, 345–366.
4 Max Vasmer, “B. Kopitars Briefwechsel mit Jakob Grimm,” Abhandlungen der Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, 1938, xxxviii+217 pp.; Jagić, Briefwechsel zwischen Dobrowsky und Kopitar (Berlin, 1885). See also, Vasmer, “Bausteine,” op. cit., passim.
5 In its final form the collection of Vuk (1787–1864) was entitled Srpske narodne pyesme. The songs began to appear in 1818. The first semi-complete collection came out in three volumes in Leipzig, 1823–1824, the fourth volume of this following in 1833.
6 The record of these friendships is to be found in the various collections of her correspondence, for which see Note 3. See also the works referred to in Note 4. In addition mention must be made to Talvj's debt to the popular and engaging Wilhelm Mülller (1794–1827), father of the British philologist Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), and the popularizer, through his Neugriechische Volkslieder (1825), of Claude Fauriel's famous Contes populaires de la Grèce moderne (1824–1825). The theme “Talvj and Wilhelm Müller” deserves thorough investigation and can not be dismissed in a footnote.
7 Über die Indianischen Sprachen Amerikas (Leipzig, 1834). A translation of the article John Pickering wrote on this subject for Francis Lieber's Encyclopedia Americana, 1831, VI, 580–600.
8 Op. cit., IV (April, 1834), 328–413, and July, 1834, pp. 417–531. Talvj drew heavily, in the two articles, on Šafařík's Geschichte der slawischen Sprache und Literatur (1826). Later she reworked the material in these and her other Slavic articles (see Note 2) and published the expanded and revised work which resulted in book form as An Historical View of the language and Literature of the Slavs, New York: Harpers, 1850.
* Italics here and throughout are Talvj's, not mine.
9 North American Review, XLII, 42 (April, 1836), 274, in an article on “Teutonic Popular Poetry.”
10 The Exiles (1853), p. 240. This is an English translation of Die Auswanderer (1852).
11 For a full and detailed account of Percival's progress in Slavonics, see, Coleman, A. P., “James Gates Percival and Slavonic Culture,” Slavia (San Francisco), XVI, No. 3, (June, 1941), 65–75 Google Scholar. John Bowring (1792–1872), the British Benthamite and polyglot, author of many volumes of translation from the Slavonic, notably Servian Popular Poetry (London, 1827), figures largely in this. For more about Bowring and the Slavs, see, Coleman, A. P., “John Bowring and the Poetry of the Slavs,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, LXXXIV, 3 (May, 1941), pp. 431–459 Google Scholar. This contains a full bibliography of Bowring's writings on the Slavs, as well as a list of articles in English periodicals commenting on Bowring as a translator. See also, Miloš Sova, “Sir John Bowring and the Slavs,” The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. XXI, No. 57 (Nov., 1943), pp. 128–144. The author of this article takes no account, unfortunately, of my earlier and somewhat exhaustive study, mentioned above.
12 For the details of Percival's life we are indebted to many items, such as letters and bills, as yet unpublished, which are to be found in the Percival Paper? at Yale, as well as to the excellent unpublished Biographic Study of James Gales Percival by Harry Redcay Warfel, on file at Yale University Library. Professor Warfel deserves our gratitude also for his work in collating the Percival Papers, from which we have profited greatly.
13 Permission to publish the letters has graciously been granted us by the Trustees of Yale University Library, to whom we hereby express our thanks.
* For his help in the revision of my transcription of these letters I should like to express my thanks to Professor Vasmer.
14 Mala prostonarodna slaveno-serbska pyesmarilsa (Vienna, 1814). This contains 100 “women's songs,” “Frauenlieder” as Talvj called them, and 6 “heroic songs,” “Heldenlieder” in German, “yunachke pyesme” in Serbian.
15 For Talvj's correspondence with Goethe about this poem, see Goethe Jahrbuch, 1891, pp. 34–38. Talvj's version of it is to be found in Volkslieder (1825), II, 275–279. Bowring's version is in his Servian Popular Poetry, pp. 27–34.
16 For Talvj's translation of this, see Volkslieder, 1825, II, 51.
17 Talvj's opinion of Bowring, based on his Serbian translations, was a low one. See her letter to Kopitar, Sitzungsberichte, cited in Note 3, a, pp. 480–481. Later she modified her view somewhat, as we see in her rather favorable mention of him, as compared with Lockhart, in her article on “Spanish Popular Poetry,” cited in Note 2.
18 The poem under discussion here is the one which Talvj translated (Volkslieder [1825], I, 56) as“Irdische Denkmaler” and which Bowring (Serbian Popular Poetry, pp. 167–169) called “The Young Shepherds.” Bowring had a guilty feeling about this translation, for, as he admits in a footnote, he has wandered much farther from the original here than is his custom. In order partially to make amends for this, he offers the Servian original of the last stanza. Thus Percival had before him three versions of the poem, Vuk's, Talvj's, and Bowring's, in Serbian (transcribed), German, and English, respectively.
19 This is, of course, the article which appeared in the North American Review, XLIII (July, 1836), 85–120.
20 Op. cit., pp. 85–90.
21 Letter from Woods (1774–1854) to Percival, March 9, 1835, among the Percival Papers at Yale.
22 Woods edited this from 1834, when it was founded, through 1837, four volumes in all. He did not publish in this time any review of Talvj's work.
23 These items are to be found on the pages given by Talvj in both the 1825 and 1835 editions of her Volkslieder. In the revised, 1853, edition, they are on different pages. The Serbian originals are in the 1823–1824 edition of Vuk's Srpske narodne pyesme.
24 Goethe himself had thought this fine enough to translate, in Kunst und Alterthum, V, No. I, pp. 84–92. For Bowring's translation, see Servian Popular Poetry, pp. 97–106.
26 For Talvj's translations of the poem? referred to in this paragraph, see the 1825 edition of her Volkslieder as follows: “Der kranke Doitschin,” I, 98–108; “Tod des Königssohnes Marko,” I, 254–259; “Auszug und Schlacht,” I, 125–131; “Die Schlacht auf dem Mischarfelde,” II, 337–343; “Der Tod des Meho Orugdschitsch,” II, 344–355.
26 John Gibson Lockhart, “Translations from the Servian Minstrelsy,” op. cit., XXXV, No. 69, pp. 66–86, January, 1827. Percival replied to this question as follows: “Such versions are not at all to my taste. They seem to me a poor sort of literary trifling. I would recommend the writer to stick to his punning Jongleurs and not deform the simple native poetry of the Servians.” See the letter of Percival published on pp. 444–453 of Wartel, Unpublished Biographic Study, mentioned in Note 12. Bowring refers to these translations in a more flattering manner, in a footnote on p. 28.
* Serbian for “heroic songs.”
27 This appeared in 1833, as mentioned in Note 5.
28 The letter referred to in Note 26.
29 A further statement by Talvj of her principles as a translator is to be found in her article on Spanish Popular Poetry, North American Review, LIV, 421: “A strict adherence not only to the form and to the genius of the original as a whole, but also to the peculiar modes of expression, so far a.j these constitute the individual feature of its physiognomy — this is what we now require from a translator of poetry.”
30 Percival had probably seen Grimm's translation of the ballad on the building of Scutari, “Die Aufmauerung Scutari's,” Kunst und Alterthum, v, No. 2, pp. 24–35, and compared it with Talvj's own translation and with Bowring's. Grimm was, of course, the one responsible for Talvj's interest in Serbian folk poetry in the first place, as is well known.
31 See her correspondence with Goethe, especially the portion cited in Note 15.
32 Volkslieder, II, p. 3.
33 She herself heard them from the lips of Vuk himself. He visited Halle as a guest of the celebrated grammarian Johann Severin Vater (1771–1826) in 1823. See Vasmer, “Bausteine,” op. cit., p. 87.
34 The above mentioned Wilhelm Müller was one of the first foreigners to become interested in Italian popular poetry. See his Rom, Römer und Römerinnen (Berlin, 1820), I, 47 seq. It was probably from Müller himself and from this work of his that Talvj became interested in it, in turn.
36 Op. cit., pp. vi-vii.
38 The translations from the Russian referred to by Talvj are Percival's English versions of some of the folk poems in Otto von Goetze's Stimmen des russischen Volks in Liedern, Stuttgart, 1828, which Percival owned. The translations had been published in the Connecticut Journal, New Haven, May 1, 8, and 15, 1832.
37 Dr. George Hayward (1791–1863), a well known physician of Boston who, like George Ticknor, often befriended Percival.
38 She is referring to the 1842 edition of John Gibson Lockhart's Ancient Spanish Ballads, Historical and Romantic, reviewed by herself later in the North American Review. See Notes 2 and 17.
39 Grimm's Silva de romances viejos, 1815, introduced Talvj to this in 1823; see Vasmer, “Bausteine,” op. cit., p. 47.
40 See Note 25.
41 The three translations by Percival were: “Thine Alone till Death,” op. cit., 101–102. “The Postilion,” p. 105; and “The Boyar's Execution,” pp. 108–109.
42 Julius Hammond Ward, Life and Letters of James Gates Percival (Boston, 1866), p. 39.
43 Versuch einer geschichtlichen Charakterislik der Volkslieder der germanischen Nationen (Leipzig, 1840), Vorwort, p. viii.