Dorothea Tieck
Dorothea Tieck (* March 1799 in Berlin ; † February 21, 1841 in Dresden ) was a German translator. Together with her father Ludwig Tieck and Wolf Heinrich Graf von Baudissin , she made numerous translations of the works of William Shakespeare , but also translated other things from Spanish and English.
Life
Dorothea Tieck was born in Berlin in 1799 as the eldest daughter of the writer Ludwig Tieck and the daughter of the theologian Julius Gustav Alberti , Amalie Alberti. Dorothea Tieck converted to Catholicism as early as 1805 under the influence of her mother.
Dorothea Tiecks showed her thirst for knowledge and talent for languages from an early age. She learned French, English, Italian and Spanish, but also Greek and Latin, so that she could read Shakespeare's works, but also Calderón , Homer , Livy , Virgil , Dante and Horace in the original. In 1819 the family went to Dresden. Dorothea Tieck became the father's assistant in the following years and supported him in his studies and work. She has translated works by Shakespeare, but she has also translated several works from Spanish. Dorothea Tiecks name was never mentioned and was often replaced by that of her father.
The death of her mother in 1837 plunged Dorothea Tieck into depression. The declared favorite child of Ludwig Tieck suffered particularly from the father's new relationship with Countess Finkenstein. Mournful thoughts and reluctance to live led to a constant struggle with herself, so that she even considered going to a monastery. The feeling of having to look after her father as the eldest daughter prevented her from doing so. In addition to her literary work, the deeply religious Dorothea Tieck was also active in a Catholic women's association and taught handicrafts to girls from the lowest classes in a school for the poor .
She fell ill with measles and died of an additional nervous fever in February 1841 unmarried in Dresden. Like her mother, she was buried in the Old Catholic Cemetery in Dresden. Both graves have not been preserved. However, a plaque in the cemetery commemorates Dorothea Tieck.
The Shakespeare Translations
The sonnets
Ludwig Tieck had already dealt with William Shakespeare very early on. As early as 1796 he came up with the plan to translate Shakespeare's complete works into German. His plan was thwarted by August Wilhelm Schlegel's translation of 14 works by Shakespeare, which appeared from 1797. Ludwig Tieck therefore turned first to English works, the translation of which appeared in 1823 under the title Shakespeare's Preschool . The translations of Robert Greene's The Wonderful Sage of Father Baco and the anonymous Arden von Feversham came from Dorothea Tieck.
The next major project were the sonnets of Shakespeare, the translation of which was much more difficult due to the fixed stanza form . In Ludwig Tieck's essay On Shakespeare's Sonnets, a few words, along with samples of a translation of the same , which appeared in the journal Penelope in 1826 , Ludwig Tieck admitted that the translation of the sonnets had been made by a younger friend . This was his daughter Dorothea, who had translated all of Shakespeare's sonnets from 1820 on, 25 of which were printed in the journal Penelope .
The Schlegel-Tieck translation of Shakespeare
August Wilhelm Schlegel's plan to provide a complete translation of Shakespeare's works was broken off in 1810 after 14 dramas. From 1825 Ludwig Tieck took over the Shakespeare project, who at the time had already been working on a translation of Macbeth and the play Love's Labor's Lost . But as early as 1830, Ludwig Tieck described his work on the Shakespeare translation much more passively:
“The publisher ( Georg Andreas Reimer ) asked me to get the edition announced at the time so that I could look through the translations of younger friends who could devote all their leisure to this study and, where necessary, improve them, also some Add comments to the plays. "
In addition to Wolf Heinrich Graf von Baudissin, the young friends were also Dorothea Tieck. This form of division of labor, however, corresponded less to a planned procedure ordered by the publisher than to a spontaneous decision that was necessary under time pressure. Ludwig Tieck had received payments from Reimer for the missing translations and had already been regularly reminded to provide results for them. However, Ludwig Tieck was unable to translate the works due to numerous illnesses and social obligations.
“Then Tieck's eldest daughter Dorothea and I took heart and suggested that we viribus unitis take over the work; […] The company made rapid progress: in the course of three and a half years my colleague Macbeth, Cymbeline , the Veronese , Coriolanus , Timon of Athens and the Winter's Tale translated the remaining thirteen pieces by me. Day after day from eleven thirty to one o'clock we found ourselves in Tieck's library room: whoever had finished a piece read it aloud, the two other members of our college compared the lecture with the original, and approved, suggested changes, or rejected it. "
In collaboration with Wolf Heinrich Graf von Baudissin, Dorothea Tieck also translated the pieces Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew and contributed to his translation of the play Verlorene Liebesmüh Sonnets.
Macbeth had already started translating Ludwig Tieck in 1819. Dorothea Tieck finished the fragmentary German version in 1833.
Other translations
Dorothea Tieck also made translations from Spanish and English, but these appeared anonymously or under the name of Ludwig Tiecks. In 1827, Vicente Espinel's biography Life and Events of Escudero Marcos Obrégon was published , which had the subtitle translated from Spanish into German for the first time, and was accompanied by comments and a preface by Ludwig Tieck . Her translation of Cervantes' Sufferings of Persiles and Sigismunda appeared anonymously in 1838 with a foreword by Ludwig Tieck. Friedrich von Raumer prompted Dorothea Tieck finally to the translation of the work Life and Letters of George Washington by Jared Sparks , published 1841st
meaning
Dorothea Tieck always stayed in the background during her work. In 1831 she wrote a letter to Friedrich von Uechtritz about her work as a translator .
"I think translating is actually more of a business for women than for men, precisely because we are not allowed to produce anything of our own."
Dorothea Tieck remained attached to this image of women all her life and, despite her literary talent, did not publish any of her own writings. She accepted the stepping down behind her father's name and even supported the secrecy of her literary work.
In her translation work, too, Dorothea Tieck, in contrast to August Wilhelm Schlegel's “poetic” translations, did not do any creative work herself, but put the faithful reproduction of the text in the foreground.
Works
All works are translations of Dorothea Tieck into German.
- The wonderful legend of Father Baco by Robert Greene (released 1823)
- Arden of Faversham (released 1823)
- Sonnets by William Shakespeare (around 1820, released 1826)
- Life and Events of Escudero Marcos Obrégon by Vicente Espinel (1827)
- Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare (with Wolf Heinrich Graf von Baudissin, 1830)
- The Taming of the Shrew (with Wolf Heinrich Graf von Baudissin, 1831)
- Coriolan by William Shakespeare (1832)
- The Two Veronese by William Shakespeare (1832)
- Timon of Athens by William Shakespeare (1832)
- A Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare (1832)
- Cymbeline by William Shakespeare (1833)
- Macbeth by William Shakespeare (1833)
- Suffering of Persiles and Sigismunda of Cervantes (1838)
- Life and Letters of George Washington by Jared Sparks (1839)
literature
- Wilhelm Bernhardi: Tieck, Dorothea . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 38, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1894, p. 246 f.
- Käthe Stricker : Dorothea Tieck and her work for Shakespeare . In: German Shakespeare Society (Hrsg.): Shakespeare Yearbook . 72, 1936, pp. 79-92.
- Johann-Wilhelm Winter: Dorothea Tiecks Macbeth translation . Otto Elsner, Berlin 1938 (also Univ. Diss.).
- Christa Jansohn (Ed.): Shakespeare's sonnets in the translation of Dorothea Tiecks . Tübingen, Francke 1992.
- Dorothea Tiecks translation of the 'Arden of Faversham' . In: Christa Jansohn, Jacob Geis: Doubtful Shakespeare: On the Shakespeareapokryphs and their reception from the Renaissance to the 20th century . LIT Verlag, Berlin u. a. 2000, pp. 177-191.
- Konrad Feilchenfeldt (Hrsg.): German Literature Lexicon . Volume 22. Saur, Munich and Zurich 2002, p. 615.
- Anne Baillot : “A friend here would take over this work with my help.” Dorothea Tieck's work on her father's translations, together with 3 unedited letters from J. Sparks to Fr. von Raumer from the years 1836–1837 . In: Brunhilde Wehinger (Ed.): Translation culture in the 18th century. Translators in Germany, France and Switzerland . Wehrhahn, Hannover-Laatzen 2008, pp. 187–206.
Web links
- Literature by and about Dorothea Tieck in the catalog of the German National Library
- Works by Dorothea Tieck in Project Gutenberg ( currently not usually available for users from Germany )
- Dorothea Tieck in the Internet Archive
Individual evidence
- ↑ See ADB, Winter (1938), the DLL (2002) states January 21st as the date of death.
- ↑ In a letter to his brother, he called her "his pride and joy". See EH Zeydel: Ludwig Tieck and England . Princeton 1931, p. 224.
- ^ Gudrun Schlechte: The old Catholic cemetery in Friedrichstadt in Dresden . Hille, Dresden 2004, p. 23.
- ↑ See Winter, p. 15.
- ↑ Shakespeare's Dramatic Works, translated by AW Schlegel, supplemented and explained by Ludwig Tieck . Volume III. Berlin 1830, p. 3.
- ↑ Wolf Heinrich Graf von Baudissin: Memories . Volume 1. Vienna 1871, p. 12.
- ^ Friedrich von Uechtritz: Memories . Leipzig 1884, p. 157.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Tieck, Dorothea |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German Shakespeare translator |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 1799 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Berlin |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 21, 1841 |
| Place of death | Dresden |