German translations of Shakespeare's works

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This article describes the history of the German translations of Shakespeare's works .

Work adaptations in the 17th century on the European continent

How Shakespeare's works found their way to the continent in the 17th century can be seen from the records of the repertoire of traveling theaters. These indicate that the dramas were performed in Holland and Germany while he was still alive. Due to its close political ties to England in the 17th century and London as a destination for Dutch emigrants, Holland assumed a special function as a hinge for the transport of cultural knowledge from England to the continent. The pieces performed on the traveling stages were probably greatly shortened versions. Nevertheless, they quickly found expression in the work of continental European entertainment literature. Some of these works have survived in the Netherlands from the early 17th century. Around 1641 Jan Vos published the piece Aran en Titus , an arrangement by Titus Andronicus . Lambert van den Bosch wrote the piece Roode en witte Roose from 1651, which is an adaptation of the drama Richard III. represents. In 1654, Abraham Sybant's De Dolle Bruyloft , a processing of the material from The Taming of the Shrew, appeared . Based on the repertoire of English traveling actors, the literary scholar Wilhelm Creizenach , who comes from Frankfurt am Main, researched in his history of the more recent drama that a play entitled Romeo and Juliet had already been performed in 1604. Around 1620 a selection of the pieces "English Comedies and Tragedies" was published. A few years later (1626) four Shakespeare plays, including a version of Hamlet , were performed in Dresden .

Transfers into German in the 17th century

The reception of Shakespeare in German-speaking countries began in the 17th century with the printing of dramatic texts in addition to the performances on the English traveling stages. However, these were not translations in the strict sense, but shortened adaptations. The first printed adaptation was a version of Titus Andronicus from 1620 in the Engelische Comedien und Tragedien collection by Friedrich Menius . By Andreas Gryphius processing the craft scene from the native Midsummer Night's Dream , printed in 1657 under the title Absurda Comica or Mr. Peter Quince . The theater manuscript Der Jude von Venetien , written around 1670 by the comedian Christoph Blümel , is an adaptation of The Merchant of Venice . In 1672 an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew was published under the title: The art of all arts to make an evil woman good. In 1677 a dispute between virtue and love appeared with echoes of Twelfth Night .

The 18th century

The lost manuscript of The Punished Fratricide , a Hamlet adaptation published in 1781, dates back to 1710 . 1758 followed the publication of a translation of Romeo and Juliet in blank verse by the Swiss Simon Grynaeus . In the same year Christian Felix Weisse published an adaptation of Richard III. , followed by a Romeo and Juliet version in 1767. The first text-accurate translation of one of Shakespeare's works into German was an attempt at a bound translation of the funeral play about the death of Julius Caesar by Caspar Wilhelm von Borck in 1741.

The time of the Wieland-Eschenburg translation

In 1762 Wieland began work on the first complete edition of Shakespeare's works in German. His text was based on the edition by William Warburton from the year 1747. He first translated, among other things, Ein St. Johannis Nachts-Traum in verse form, but then chose the prose form for further work. By 1766 he had broadcast a total of 22 dramas. Johann Joachim Eschenburg continued the Wieland edition in the years 1775–1777. He used the much more reliable edition of Shakespeare's works by Johnson and Steevens from 1773 as a text basis and worked very conscientiously on improvements. The Mannheim professor Gabriel Eckert obtained an unauthorized reprint of the Eschenburg edition under his own name from 1778–1780. In the collection of folk songs. First part of 1778 Herder added passages from Shakespeare's works that he rated as particularly beautiful as a translation model in verse form. Although they initially remained just drafts, they are considered the first contributions to the preparatory work for a new translation. The transfer of Love's Labor's Lost from 1774 under the title Amor vincit omnia by Reinhold Lenz and Gottfried August Bürger was significant for this development . Lenz later worked on a Coriolan (1775) and Bürger on a Macbeth translation (1783).

The Schlegel-Tieck translation

A total of four authors, Wolf Heinrich von Baudissin and Dorothea Tieck, were involved in the so-called Schlegel - Tieck edition (including the preliminary work) between 1789 and 1833 . Schlegel made his first attempts to translate Midsummer Night's Dream together with Burger in 1789 , and in 1796 Romeo and Juliet appeared as a preprint in Schiller's Horen . Schlegel had been working on Hamlet since 1793. In addition to Julius Caesar , The Storm , The Merchant of Venice , What You Want and How You Like It , four more histories were published until, in 1801, after a dispute with the publisher Johann Friedrich Unger , Schlegel was abandoned Work came. At this time, Tieck began to translate Love's Labor's Lost , but did not agree with the new publisher Georg Reimer until 1824 about the conditions for a continuation, and so in 1825/26 a new edition of Schlegel's translations with Teck's additions appeared: Shakespeare's dramatic works, translated by August Wilhelm Schlegel, supplemented and explained by Ludwig Tieck . Since Tieck stopped work immediately after the first three volumes were published, it took another four years to find a translator in Baudissin (who contributed 13 pieces) who, with the support of Tieck's daughter (who contributed 5 dramas), found the complete edition Completed in the period from 1830 to 1833.

Consolidation in the 19th century

Even before the Schlegel-Tieck translation was completed, the translation work began to be consolidated with an edition that was published by Johann Heinrich Voss and his two sons Abraham Voss and Heinrich Voss until 1829. Two years earlier, the young Heinrich Voss had arranged for a compilation of the editions of Eschenburg and Schlegel. At the beginning of the 19th century a more intensive occupation began with the translation of the poetic works of Shakespeare. First, from around 1803 , Karl Ludwig Kannegießer tried to get the first translations, but these remained fragments. It was followed in 1820 by the first complete translation by one of the fathers of textual criticism , Karl Lachmann , followed by the highly regarded edition by Gottlob Regis in the Shakespeare Almanac of 1836. In order to meet the requirements of a text suitable for the stage, Franz Dingelstedt planned an edition from 1858 of dramas for theater practice. The result was three editions, a ten-volume edition by Dingelstedt from 1865 to 1867, that by the collective of authors around Friedrich Bodenstedt in 38 volumes from 1876 to 1881 and the 12-volume edition of works by the German Shakespeare Society from the same years, provided by Hermann Ulrici .

The reorientation of translation work in the 20th century

The reorientation of work on German-language Shakespeare editions in the early 20th century comprised three steps. Michael Bernays and Alois Brandl used text-critical work to restore the state of the Schlegel-Tieck text in two editions from 1871 to 1873 (12 volumes) and 1897 (10 volumes, second edition 1922f). Hermann Conrad then proved in several investigations from 1902 translation errors in the old editions and Friedrich Gundolf obtained from 1908 to 1918 (10 volumes) and 1920–1922 ( new edition in 6 volumes) an attempt at a poetic renewal of a “Shakespeare in German” a focus of the reconstruction of the Schlegel edition, which is assessed as a narrowing of the diversity of the 19th century editions. In 1909 Stefan George published his "Umdichtung" Shakespeare. Sonnets. , which Karl Kraus called a "rape of two languages" and answered with a "post-poetry" (Vienna 1933). Kraus refused to adapt the dramas to the needs of the stage and performed Baudissin-Tieck versions "linguistically renewed" by him for over two decades - including a Hamlet - on his "reading stage". Rudolf Alexander Schröder tried with his transmissions of 10 dramas that appeared in 1963 to restore the "baroque" character of Shakespeare's works. In 1967 Paul Celan's "Further Poetry" was published by W. Shakespeare, Twenty-One Sonnets. Since then, almost 50 translations of the sonnets into German have appeared.

Game texts and rough translations

While poets and critics such as George, Kraus and Schröder placed the focus of their occupation on the reading versions and the poetic work, other translators turned to stage practice under the impression of the rehabilitation of the First Folio by Pollard and the accompanying increasing interest in the works as play texts and worked increasingly on translations suitable for the stage. Hans Ludwig Rothe completed his nine-volume edition ( Der Elizabethan Shakespeare ), which he had begun in 1916, in 1955–1959 , but he doubted the authority of the First Folio. In contrast, Richard Flatter recognized the value of the First Folio for stage practice (6 volumes, Vienna 1952–1955), which was more widely used in practice than Rothe's texts. In the former GDR, Rudolf Schaller worked on versions that were suitable for games; his edition was published in the GDR from 1960 and in West Berlin from 1964 . From the seventies onwards, Maik Hamburger's work received more attention. The most frequently used dramatic texts come from Erich Fried ( Shakespeare. 27 pieces in 3 volumes. Berlin 1989). The edition by Wolfgang Swaczynna (from 1967, only stage manuscripts) was geared primarily towards the requirements of small stages. The modern directorial theater is making less and less use of finished editions. Only the translations by Peter Stein and Michael Wachsmann found further use. In order to meet these requirements, editorial collectives worked out rough translations that were as precise as possible. From 1973 these appeared in Reclam's Universal Library and since 1976 the English-German study edition of Shakespeare's dramas has been published , which is designed as a bilingual single edition with scientific commentary. Since 1976, the bilingual annotated translation by Frank Günther, published by dtv, has met the requirements of a reading version that is as precise as possible .

literature

English secondary literature
German secondary literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Albert Cohn: Shakespeare in Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth Century: An Account of English Actors in Germany and the Nederlands and of the Plays performed by them during the same period. 1865. Wilhelm Creizenach: plays of the English comedians. Stuttgart 1889. Julian Hilton. The Englische Komoedianten in German-speaking states, 1592-1620. DPhil. University of Oxford 1984.
  2. ^ FJ Bense: Anglo-Dutch Relations from the earliest times to William III. The Hague 1924.
  3. ↑ Lara Hunt Yungblut: Strangers settelt here amongst us. Politics, Perceptions and Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England. New York 1996.
  4. ^ W. Braekmann: Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus: Its Relationship to the German Play from 1620 and to Jan Vos Aran en Titus. Genth 1969.
  5. ↑ Oscar James Campell: The Position of the "Roode en witte Roose." In the Saga of King Richard III. Madison 1919.
  6. ^ Rui Manuel G. de Carvalho Homem and AJ Hoenselaars: Translating Shakespeare for the Twenty-first Century. 2004. p. 79ff. Theo d 'Haen and Bart Westerweel: Something Understood: Studies in Anglo-Dutch Literary Translation. P. 144.
  7. ^ Karl Goedecke and Julius Tittmann: The plays of the English comedians in Germany. Reprint from 1880.
  8. ↑ Johannes Bolte: The Jew from Venetia - the oldest German version of the Merchant of Venice. In: "Yearbook of the German Shakespeare Society on behalf of the board of directors edited by FA Leo. Twenty-second year. Weimar 1887". Pages 189-201.
  9. ↑ Ina Schabert: Shakespeare Handbook. Pp. 728-730.
  10. ↑ Günther Erken in: Ina Schabert (ed.): Shakespeare Handbuch 2009. P. 823.
  11. ^ Elsa Jaubert: Richard III et Roméo et Juliette de Christian Felix Weisse: une voie médiane entre la barbarie anglaise et la superficialité française? in: Revue Germanique Internationale, 5, 2007, pp. 23–35. doi : 10.4000 / rgi.169 .
  12. ^ Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells: The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. OUP 2001. Article: Germany pp. 161–163.
  13. ↑ Günther Erken in: Ina Schabert (ed.): Shakespeare Handbuch 2009. S. 824f.
  14. ↑ Günther Erken in: Ina Schabert (ed.): Shakespeare Handbuch 2009. pp. 826–828.
  15. ↑ Günther Erken in: Ina Schabert (ed.): Shakespeare Handbuch 2009. pp. 828–831.
  16. ^ Günther Erken in: Ina Schabert (ed.): Shakespeare Handbuch 2009. pp. 832–834.
  17. ^ Hermann Conrad: Difficulties of the Shakespeare translation 1906.
  18. ↑ Günther Erken in: Ina Schabert (ed.): Shakespeare Handbuch 2009. pp. 834–837.
  19. ^ Deutsche Welle (www.dw.com): Shakespeare - always reloaded | Culture | DW | 04/23/2016. Retrieved January 10, 2018 .