Robert Nisbet Bain

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Robert Nisbet Bain (* 1854 ; † May 1909 ) was a British historian , folklorist and linguist who, thanks to his extensive knowledge of languages, published works on Scandinavian and Russian history as well as translations from Scandinavian, Slavic and Hungarian.

Life

In addition to his work in the library of the British Museum as an assistant librarian , he dealt with Scandinavian and Slavic history. He also translated fairy tales and sagas from Ukrainian , Russian and even Hungarian into English. The National Library of Scotland has a collection of letters from 1876 to 1896. His works on 18th-century Swedish history and early tsars saw many editions. He is also significant as one of Hans Christian Andersen's first biographers and translators .

In his translations, he proceeded with great respect for the original due to his versatile language skills, but was not afraid to cut off a third in excursions:

"It is no light task to attempt to transplant a classic like" Egy Magyar Nábob ". National tastes differ infinitely, and then there is the formidable initial difficulty of contending with a strange and baffling non-aryan language. Only those few hardy linguists who have learned, in the sweat of their brows, to read a meaning into that miracle of agglutinative ingenuity, an Hungarian sentence, will be able to appreciate the immense labor of rendering some four hundred pages of a Magyar masterpiece of peculiarly idiomatic difficulty into fairly readable English. But my profound admiration for the illustrious Hungarian romancer, and my intimate conviction that, of all continental novelists, he is most likely to appeal to healthy English taste, which has ever preferred the humorous and romantic story to the "Tendenz-Roman", or novel with a purpose, have encouraged me to persevere to the end of my formidable task. I may add, in conclusion, that I have taken the liberty to cut out a good third of the original work, and this I have done advisedly, having always been very strongly of opinion that the "technique" of the original tale suffered from an excess of episode. "

In the United States in particular , his translations and historical writings were so popular that The American Historical Review published a brief obituary on the death of 54-year-old Bains.

Fonts

History

  • Gustavus III. and his contemporaries 1746-1792. 2 volumes. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, London 1894.
  • The daughter of Peter the Great. A history of Russian diplomacy. Archibald Constable, Westminster 1899.
  • Peter III Emperor of Russian. The story of a crisis and a crime. Archibald Constable, London 1902.
  • Scandinavia. A political history of Denmark, Norway and Sweden from 1513 to 1900. University Press, Cambridge 1905. Archives
  • The last King of Poland and his contemporaries. Methuen, London 1909.
  • Charles XII and the Collapse of the Swedish Empire 1682-1719. , New York: Putnam's 1895, reprint NA Kessinger. 2006, ISBN 1-4326-1903-9 , Archives

Legends

  • Russian Fairy Tales. 1892.
  • Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales. Lawrence and Bullen, London 1894.
  • Turkish Fairy Tales and Folk Tales. 1896.
  • Tales from Tolstoy. 1901.
  • Tales from Gorky. 1902.

Translations

  • Mór Jókai :
    • Egy Magyar Nábob. 1850. English: A Hungarian Nabob. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York 1899.
    • The Day of Wrath.
    • The Poor Plutocrats.
  • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie :
    • Weird Tales from Northern Seas.

literature

  • Elias Bredsdorff: Danish literature in english translation. In: Orbis Litterarum. 5, 1, 1947, pp. 187-257. doi : 10.1111 / j.1600-0730.1947.tb00954.x
  • LC Wharton: Transcription of foreign tongues. In: Transactions of the Philological Society. 29, 1, pp. 59-112 doi : 10.1111 / j.1467-968X.1921.tb00762.x
  • Roxoliana Zorivchak: The first English translations of Ukrainian fairy tales. In: Forum. 62. Summer 1985, pp. 9-11.

Web links

Single receipts

  1. ↑ a b The American Historical Review , Vol. 14, No. 4, July 1909, p. 864 (on links.jstor.org)
  2. ^ Marus Jókai : A Hungarian Nabob. Translated from Hungarian by Robert Nisbet Bain. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York 1899, foreword
  3. ↑ Four translations by Bain on gutenberg.org
  4. ↑ E-Text on gutenberg.org
  5. ↑ E-Text on gutenberg.org
personal data
SURNAME Bain, Robert Nisbet
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nisbet Bain, Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British historian, folklorist and linguist
DATE OF BIRTH 1854
DATE OF DEATH May 1909