Wieland’s translations of Horace’s Epistles, neglected until recently, demonstrate his skill in overcoming the bipolar relationship implied in the very idea of translation.
Thanks to a strong, cosmopolitan fellow-feeling with the ancient poet, Wieland made judicious editorial choices in the areas of diction, prosody, layout, typography and scholarly apparatus. This most flexible of translators avoided collapsing the distinctions between his own world and Horace’s, and achieved true communication with Horace, while simultaneously drawing the contemporary German reader into the dialogue.
Translation techniques employed by Wieland’s contemporaries are also discussed here, as well as Horace’s reception during the period, and the tensions between originality and imitation, and between ancient hexameter and modern metres.
This book, originally published in paperback in 1995 under the ISBN 978-0-901286-47-5, was made Open Access in 2024 as part of the MHRA Revivals programme.
Contents:
i-x, 1-173
Horace’s Epistles, Wieland and the Reader: A Three-Way Relationship Jane Veronica Curran Complete volume as single PDF
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1-7
Introduction: An Original Eighteenth-Century Horace Jane Veronica Curran doi:10.59860/td.c37de9e
This study was undertaken to examine the nature of C. M. Wieland’s relationship with the Roman poet Horace as this is revealed in his translation of Horace’s Epistles (which were written in 20-13 BC). The source text is the recent edition of Wieland’s Übersetzung des Horaz which was published by the German classicist Manfred Fuhrmann in 1986. After publishing some sample translations of Horace’s Epistles in the Teutscher Merkur, Wieland published his first complete translation of the Epistles in 1782. He then brought out a revised edition of his translation in 1790 with the very substantial addition of the complete Latin text. Minor corrections were undertaken for the final, posthumous edition of 1816.
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9-36
Chapter I: Horace in Eighteenth-Century Germany Jane Veronica Curran doi:10.59860/td.c48d2e5
Wieland’s Horace translations were published during the wave of enthusiasm for antiquity which swept the German world of letters in the eighteenth century. The status of ancient writers became a burning issue for lively debate; both Greek and Roman poets continued to provide myths, settings, issues, characters and general inspiration as well as forms and techniques for large numbers of original modern works. Wieland was prominent among those who borrowed from the ancient heritage, as we can see from his Geschichte des Agathon, Musarion, and Geschichte der Abderiten, to name but three. The eagerness with which translations from ancient texts were undertaken and published was a significant manifestation of that enthusiasm. Wieland, in translating Horace, was not offering his readers something they would otherwise have been unable to procure; Horace was well known and widely read, both in the original and in German translations. And yet Wieland’s translations of Horace’s Satires and Epistles, with their curiously personal style and tone occupy a rather special place in the market.
The commentary to his Horace translations alone furnishes ample evidence of the breadth of Wieland’s familiarity with the Classical world and of his competence as a philologist. This combination in Wieland of receptivity to, or perhaps even assimilation of, the spirit inhabiting the works of others, and his thorough and dedicated devotion to the Classics, produced in him a talent for presenting ancient figures sympathetically. This talent includes a particular type of expertise in cross referencing, so that he not only sees the Socratic in Horace, but the Horatian in Erasmus, the Rococo potential in Lucian (in the Göttergespräche and Comische Erzählungen), the framework for ‘ein moralisches Gedicht’ in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, and Democritus as a citizen of Biberach.
The feature of his literary make-up which caused Wieland to be drawn to certain writers, and to adopt their styles of writing or their material — as sources for his own works — earned him considerable notoriety. Wieland was perfectly frank about this feature in himself, and argued that it placed him in the company of the greatest of poets. Yet the contemporary critical view was inclined to see this practice, in Wieland’s case, as lack of originality, or even plagiarism.
Wieland offers us no systematic, self-contained theory of translation, nor does he outline any scheme which could then be tested against his principles as a translator. The main sources for his views on translation are reviews of others work, and prefaces to his own translations. If Wieland is included at all in histories of eighteenth-century translation theory, the reference will be to one of his reviews. Wieland’s thoughts on various aspects of translation, whether occasioned by a review or a preface, may appear to be expressed abstractly, but they always apply to a particular work; they are essentially pragmatic.
Wieland’s approach to the translation of Horace makes its own unique contribution, when placed beside the other versions that were discussed in the first chapter. As regards prosody, with his choice of a loose iambic pentameter, he steers a middle course between the rigidity of the hexameter, whether dactylic or Alexandrine, and the seemingly easier task of prose translation. He alone among contemporary Horace scholars provides prefaces, commentary, and footnotes, all in German. And he arranges for the original and his translation to be printed on the same page, with their respective distinctive typefaces. This emphasizes the movement between the two quite different cultures present in these pages. Wieland is not trying to supersede Horace: he is engaged in an exchange with him. All these points make Wieland’s translation interesting, but it is the interplay of preface, Horatian verse, translation, footnotes and commentary which distinguishes Wieland’s from all other translations of this period or earlier.
When the translation is into modern German, metrical rules for ancient languages do not fit. The translator is faced with the additional problem of converting even the method of calculating metre from a quantity-based to a stress-based system. A translator may consciously aim for an archaic sound in a modern version, and the historical gap appears to be completely bridgeable in this view. But Wieland’s method of translating, his editorial interventions, and his presentation of text and translation on each page, all indicate that the historical problem is more complex for him.
It is well known and well documented that Wieland follows Horace’s advice by diligently revising and polishing his texts. Revision was almost a compulsion with Wieland and one which was not restricted to his translations. In the case of Wieland’s versions of the Satires and Epistles, this polishing included changes to the translations themselves, and additions to the commentary and footnotes at the base of the page. For the revised edition of the Epistles in 1790, Wieland made the significant decision to add to the text of the original, which had not been included in the selections which appeared in the Teutscher Merkur or in the first edition published in book form. The physical appearance of the text reinforces the findings of previous chapters: the features of the style of translation which brought the text to life, such as the impression of a dialogue, the constant oscillation between ancient and modern, and the conversational rhythm played off against the regular iambic beat, are reflected and to some extent produced by the particular order in which the text has been compiled for the revised publication.
Wieland’s principles as a commentator are very similar to those which guided his translation (and which were analysed in the fourth chapter above). His aim remains the same on every level of the enterprise: to put the reader first. In the translation, this meant removing possible obscurities, building bridges where Horace abruptly jumps from an observation to an image, adding colourful or dramatic details to aid the imagination — in short, doing all within his power to make Horace accessible to the eighteenth-century non-specialist reader. The commentary, which includes introductions, footnotes, and short informative essays, carries on this work, but with an added dimension. There are notes and references to be found in the commentary which presuppose an occasional reader in touch with specialist issues, or a genuine scholar likely to take exception to the point Wieland is making.
Each of the chapters of this study has examined a single aspect of Wieland’s Horace, and isolated it from the other features of the Epistles, as far as this was practicable. The artificiality of maintaining this separation indicates the need to undertake an integrated look at one passage. By way of conclusion, a short reprise of the categories treated in each of the chapters will be brought to bear on a passage from Epistles 1.3, to Julius Florus, quoted below. This passage was chosen because it displays a good number of the notable features, although no one passage can encapsulate such a varied whole.
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Bibliography entry:
Curran, Jane V., Horace’s Epistles, Wieland and the Reader: A Three-Way Relationship, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 38 (MHRA, 1995)
First footnote reference:35 Jane V. Curran, Horace’s Epistles, Wieland and the Reader: A Three-Way Relationship, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 38 (MHRA, 1995), p. 21.
This title was first published by W. S. Maney & Son Ltd for the Modern Humanities Research Association and the Institute of Germanic Studies but rights to it are now held by Modern Humanities Research Association and the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies.
