Benjamin Neukirch

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Benjamin Neukirch, copper engraving portrait around 1729
Title page and frontispiece of the Neukirch collection, 1st part 1697

Benjamin Neukirch (born March 27, 1665 in Rydzyna in Silesia , † August 15, 1729 in Ansbach ) was a poet and pioneering editor for the development of the German gallant style .

Life

Neukirch initially attended school in nearby Bojanova, where his father worked as a notary, he received more intensive training in Breslau and then at the grammar school in Thorn . In 1684 he enrolled at the Brandenburg University in Frankfurt . He soon gave up his first professional position from 1687 as a lawyer in Breslau. Instead, when he returned to Frankfurt (Oder), he financed himself from 1691 on with seminars on poetry and rhetoric (compare the lives of Bohse and Hunold ). In 1693 he moved to Halle due to increasing financial problems, in 1694 he became court master and with a move to Berlin in 1696 he was an informer for Haugwitz from Dresden. The employment relationships in Berlin were not particularly prestigious, but enabled him to come into contact with the poets of the Berlin court - Canitz and Besser . The former is said to have favored him, the latter to have cut. With panegyric poems he was accepted into the academy, and from 1703 until the death of Frederick I in 1713 a professorship at the knight academy. His economic situation only improved in 1718 when he was appointed to Ansbach, which belongs to Brandenburg, where he was employed as a prince tutor and councilor until 1729 .

Benjamin Neukirch is best known in recent times as the editor of the so-called "Neukirch'schen collection" - which appeared in several volumes poem anthology Lord of Hoffmannswaldau and of other Germans choice and bissher unpublished poems (1697). Hoffmannswaldau had already written intimate, “gallant” poems for a small audience in the middle of the century, which only now inspired the current generation of authors, above all Hunold, who later continued the collection.

Among the contemporaries, Neukirch's name was primarily associated with the first German translation of Fénelon's epic Telemach in three splendid volumes (1727). In contrast to the prose version, which Bohse presented as early as 1700, Neukirch used German Alexandrian verses , which took into account the perception that Fénelon had continued the epic from antiquity into the modern era.

Works (selection)

  • Mr. Benjamin Neukirch's… exquisite poems… with a preface… by Joh. Christoph Gottscheden . Regensburg 1744.
  • (Editor) Mr. von Hoffmannswaldau and other Germans selected and previously unprinted poems , 7 volumes, publisher A. De Capua and others, Tübingen 1961 ff. (Reprints of German literary works, new version; reprint of the Leipzig and Frankfurt / Main editions 1695–1727)
  • (Translation) The incidents of the Prince of Ithaca… translated from the French of the Lord of Fénelon into German verse , 3 parts, Ansbach 1727–39

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Entry in Meyers Konversations-Lexikon at www.retrobibliothek.de
personal data
SURNAME Neukirch, Benjamin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION poet
DATE OF BIRTH March 27, 1665
PLACE OF BIRTH Rydzyna , Silesia
DATE OF DEATH August 15, 1729
Place of death Ansbach