Introduction.

Wade, Mara R. ; Ober, Warren U.

I. Kenneth H. Ober: A Life in Literature

This issue of Gemano-Slavica, thanks to the gracious encouragement and cooperation of its editor, Professor Paul M. Malone, serves as a commemoration of the life work of Kenneth H. Ober (1930-2003), whose lifelong passion was the study of European languages and literatures and whose researches focused on aspects of translation and translation studies.

After receiving a BA in French and Spanish from the University of Arkansas, Ober served in the US Army and was assigned to study Russian at the Army Language School, Monterey. After his discharge, he studied at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, becoming one of the first "study abroad" students in postwar Germany. He went on to earn an A.M. in Russian from Indiana University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois, with emphasis on Russian, Scandinavian, and German. (1) He was also among the first group of Americans to study in Moscow, participating in a course of study for university teachers of Russian at Moscow State University in 1963.

After working with various US government intelligence units, Kenneth Ober began his academic career in the early 1960s at Kansas State College in Pittsburg, Kansas. In 1962 he became head of the Russian section at Illinois State University, and later he taught and researched at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where he was a Killam Fellow in Comparative Literature, and at the University of Michigan, where he was Director of the Program in Scandinavian Studies. He ended his academic career as Graduate College Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Over his academic life he held a number of grants and awards from such bodies as the Canadian Killam Foundation; Fulbright; American Philosophical Society; National Endowment for the Humanities; Royal Library, Copenhagen; and Niels Pasko Foundation, Odense, as well as a number of research grants from the Program for Jewish Culture and Society and the Research Board, University of Illinois.

An extraordinarily productive scholar, primarily of nineteenth-century European literatures and languages, Kenneth Ober published nine books independently and two with the late P.M. Mitchell. His various publications, involving many aspects of Western and Eastern European languages and literatures, appeared in English, French, German, Danish, and Icelandic; and he is to date the only foreigner to have edited a major work of Danish literature, the diaries of the Danish-Jewish writer Meir Aron Goldschmidt, published by the Society for Danish Language and Literature. (2) Geographically, his research focused on Scandinavia, Russia, and Germany; thematically, it focused on poetry, translation studies, and Judaica. He was also for many years an MLA bibliographer and published extensively on translations of Icelandic, and also Faeroese, literature into world literatures. (3)

Ober translated two book-length Russian studies of the Icelandic sagas that are today considered milestones in the field. His translation of M. I. SteblinKamenskij's The Saga Mind opened to the West the path-breaking scholarship of this preeminent Russian scholar of Old Norse, thus enabling new directions in research. (4) An anecdote may here suffice to illuminate the importance of scholarly translation in its international context. While a visitor at a German university, Ober introduced himself to the resident German linguist and runologist, who, noting his new acquaintance's overlapping interests in Old Norse and Russian, advised him to consult the excellent English translation of this important Russian work by Steblin-Kamenskij. The academic was flabbergasted when it became clear that Ober himself was the translator of the book from which the insights of so much of the German's own research were gleaned. Kenneth Ober's lifelong study of Scandinavian and Russian literatures and cultures continued with the publication of his translation from the Russian of Eleazar M. Meletinsky's The Elder Edda and Early Forms of the Epic. (5) He also wrote several articles about Icelandic and Danish literature, (6) and translated into English not only scholarly works, but also belles lettres. His three-volume--one with P.M. Mitchell--bibliography of translations of Icelandic literature into the various languages is a further testament to his belief in the critical importance of translation to the continued life of literature. (7)

One of his central interests was the Danish-Jewish author Meir Goldschmidt (1819-1887). In his monograph on Goldschmidt, Ober wrote: "All of his life, Goldschmidt wanted to be accepted as a Dane, but was constantly being reminded by his opponents (as was the younger critic Georg Brandes) that he was a Jew and therefore an outsider. It is, however, impossible to separate Goldschmidt the Dane from Goldschmidt the Jew in his writings, and some of Goldschmidt's finest creations are his Jewish stories and Jewish characters." Ober did much to advance Goldschmidt's reputation both in Danish and in English with his dozen articles in scholarly journals, (8) his Twayne World Authors Series monograph Meir Goldschmidt, (9) his edition of Goldschmidt's diaries, his translation of Goldschmidt's pivotal novel A Jew, (10) his contributions to scholarly radio broadcasts, (11) and his translations of two of Goldschmidt's Jewish stories for English anthologies. (12) His translations opened the writings of this preeminent author of the Danish Golden Age to readers--and writers--of English.

At his death Ober had completed but not arranged for the publication of a biographical study of L.M. "Benjamin" Rothschild, a cousin of Goldschmidt's, whose name derives from the Danish place name Roskilde and whose family's assumption of the name antedates that by the famous Frankfurt family. Benjamin Rothschild--he was generally known by his Jewish name--emigrated from Denmark and went on to establish the libraries of the Jew's College, London, and of the Alliance IsraElite Universelle, Paris. (13) His history is a case study of the life of a cosmopolitan Victorian Jew, one whose philanthropy has had an enduring impact on essential institutions of Jewish life and culture to the present day.

Kenneth Ober's single most outstanding contribution to German-Jewish literature is his handbook on the ghetto story, Die Ghettogeschichte--Entstehung und Entwicklung einer Gattung. (14) His separately published articles on two of the main exponents of that genre, Karl Emil Fanzos and Nathan Samuely, complement this handbook. (15) Resembling the Yiddish stories of the shtetl more familiar to readers today through the Yiddish original or the English translation, these German-language ghetto stories constitute a nearly forgotten, but very important, genre. Ober's book defines the genre and provides chapters on the eighteen authors (including two women) of tales of the ghetto, thereby establishing a genealogy of the German-language ghetto story. His research for the handbook involved considerable detective work in finding the stories and establishing the authors and their biographies. By resurrecting from oblivion these writers, he established the canon, and this milestone seems certain to give impetus to further scholarship and writing about German-Jewish literature. Research on the volume was conducted at the Klan Library of Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, and the Royal Library, Copenhagen. These two sites have the best holdings in this important genre for the same reason: German Jews escaping the Third Reich fled, often with their beloved books, first to Denmark. When they then had to flee Denmark, their books were left behind and later acquired by the Royal Library and its world renowned Judaica collections. Volumes of ghetto stories also entered the Hebrew Union College Library when German Jews brought their books to America. Ober's study of the ghetto story has been published in German by Wallstein in Gottingen under the auspices of the Lessing Akademie in Wolfenbuttel. This important work, unfortunately, has yet to appear in English.

At his death in 2003 Kenneth Ober had completed two book manuscripts for publication--the one on Victorian Jews and the other the English-language version of his ghetto-story monograph. (16) He also had three articles awaiting publication--two with his brother on English and Russian poetry reprinted here and one on M.A. Goldschmidt as a critic of nineteenth-century German theater accepted for publication elsewhere. (17) In total, he published eleven books and some forty articles. As a translator who mediated among languages, literatures, and cultures, Kenneth Ober lived a life in literature and will be sorely missed. His career as a translator and scholar of translation studies underscores the often overlooked importance of the translator in world literature. As these essays by Kenneth Ober, Warren Ober, and Mara Wade attest, study of the translator and of translation is essential to the understanding and appreciation of national literatures and their international contexts, the development of esthetics and literary taste, and the evolution of national consciousness and literary canons.

Kenneth Ober's favorite poem was Tennyson's Ulysses. Like Tennyson's hero he could justly say, "I am a part of all that I have met...."

II. Translation as Cultural Capital: Establishing Russian Literature through Poetic Translation

"A poet translator can be an original author, even though he has written nothing of his own. A translator in prose is a slave; a translator in verse is a rival."

--Vasilij Andreevic Zukovskij

The premier Russian poet before Pushkin, Vasilij Andreevic Zukovskij, whose words cited above suggest both the scholarly challenges and the rewards of closely studying poetic translation, was himself well aware of the importance of translation and its role in establishing vernacular languages as literary languages, in forming national canons of literature, and in creating masterpieces of world literature. The close reading of poetry in any language is an act which is often richly rewarded, and the experience of poetry can be profoundly enriched through careful comparative readings of translated verse and its original. It is true that such a comparative study of translated lyrics can remain merely bi-directional, establishing, for example, a laundry list of features retained from the original poem and those omitted in the new work; but a truly nuanced comparison results in a multi-layered experience of both poems which greatly increases the understanding and appreciation of each work and, more importantly, can lead to important new insights about the poetry, its authors, and its contexts.

While the primary focus of this commemorative issue is on Russian translations of English Romantic poets as presented in a series of essays written by the brothers Kenneth H. and Warren U. Ober over a period of four decades, we also include here two additional essays for a total of sixteen articles: "Moskaw/Moskva: Sumarokov's Translations of Fleming's Sonnets" by Kenneth and his wife, Mara Wade, investigating an earlier form of cultural transfer with the introduction of the sonnet into eighteenth-century Russian literature, (18) and "Was Dudkin a Woman? Sexual/Gender Ambiguity in Bely's Peterburg," Kenneth's study of a canonical work of Russian modernism as seen through the lens of gender studies. This latter study differs from the others in that it does not involve translation and that it centers on a work of prose that experienced many authorial redactions; all of the other essays focus on the translation of verse. Although other translators are also the subjects of the Obers' studies, the majority of them focus on the two most significant Russian poets of the nineteenth century--Zukovskij and Pushkin. The articles by the brothers collected here treat the translation of English poetry into Russian and (in the two essays on Sir John Bowring's versions of poems by Zukovskij) from Russian into English, and mark a significant body of their work over a period of many years. Because one of their first collaborative articles, "Zukovskij's Translation of Oliver Goldsmith's 'The Deserted Village,'" appeared in the inaugural volume of Germano-Slavica (1, 1973), it seems only appropriate that this journal collect and reprint the essays here.

The crucial importance of the close reading of poetic translation is evident in the Obers' article announcing the discovery of what seems to be a previously unrecognized original poem by Russia's premier poet Aleksandr Pushkin. This work came to light during a line-by-line comparison of his translation of Robert Southey's Roderick with the English poet laureate's original. Owing to the circumstances of their preservation, Pushkin's thirty-six lines have long been regarded as a rejected portion of the Roderick translation; however, the Obers' article reprinted here argues that this work is an independent, highly personal poem, resulting in part from the Russian poet's intense involvement with the process of translation. This discovery could well lead to a reorganization of Pushkin's poetry in future editions, and perhaps even to a reassessment of the poet's mental state on the eve of his death from a duelling wound. The second article on Pushkin discusses his version of William Wordsworth's "Scorn Not the Sonnet," in which Wordsworth gave John Milton pride of place as a master sonneteer. Pushkin in his sonnet gracefully pays Wordsworth the compliment of substituting him for Milton. Thus Wordsworth becomes to Pushkin what Milton was to Wordsworth.

As these essays attest, a poem and its translations can resonate through the centuries across languages and cultures. Walter Benjamin confirms the special status, and the critical importance, of translation when he states that "a translation issues from the original--not so much from its life as from its afterlife. For a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life." (19) Here we might continue Benjamin's argument by adding that important works of world literature, at the time of their origin, also do not find the language(s) into which they are to be translated. Later, when these works do seek and find their language(s) of translation, this foreign linguistic existence, this new cross-cultural afterlife, imbues the translated text with new meanings, new possibilities, and a new identity as a work of world literature and common cultural heritage. And that afterlife of the translation is the focus of the essays presented here. By offering detailed comparisons of translated poems and their originals--some of which represent literary milestones and constitute important works in the national canons of their respective literary cultures--these articles contend that significant new insights and interpretations are the reward of painstaking philological work, offering a fresh critical basis both for the original and the translated poem. Translation, especially of poetry, is not a mechanical undertaking, but an act of creation, and these studies confirm the elevated status which should be accorded translators who both open works in foreign languages to new audiences and simultaneously create new works in their own native literatures. As the Russian poet and translator Zukovskij wrote of himself: "Almost everything I have is someone else's and yet everything is my own."

As in the instances noted above, these nuanced readings illustrate the art of both poetry and translation. For example, Zukovskij in his translation of "Lord Ullin's Daughter" individualizes and humanizes Thomas Campbell's characters and yet universalizes them and gives the poem authenticity by painstakingly associating it with Ossianic myth. And in his translation of Gray's "Elegy" the Russian poet's concreteness maintains Gray's objectivity, while his (and the reader's) emotional involvement is never allowed to slide into sentimentality. But Zukovskij's translation of Lord Byron's "The Prisoner of Chillon" and his translations of the ballads of Robert Southey present the master translator at his superb best. He always does justice to Byron's fine monologue, and sometimes more than justice to Southey's somewhat uneven ballads, in his unerring handling of theme, structure, characterization, and concreteness of imagery. And Zukovskij's "To Nina," his second translation of Bishop Thomas Percy's tribute to his wife, "O Nancy, wilt thou go with me" (first identified as the original of "To Nina" by the Obers), subtly improves upon its lovely but conventional original through use of precise, concrete, and fresh imagery.

When the most gifted German lyric poet of the seventeenth century, Paul Fleming, captured in verse his travels to Russia and Persia, his sonnets about Moscow later served to introduce that poetic genre into Russian through the translations by Aleksandr Petrovich Sumarokov. Thus, poetry can be a medium of cultural exchange at all levels, and the study of translated poetry is crucial to literary history. The articles collected here, then, provide an opportunity to experience a microcosm of literary translation by some of Europe's greatest poets of some of the greatest poetry, as well as several workmanlike but undistinguished efforts such as Ivan Ivanovich Kozlov's translation of Charles Wolfe's stirring "The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna" (which thus contrasts with his brilliant translation of Thomas Moore's "Those Evening Bells"); Dmitrij Egorovich Min's translation of George Crabbe's "Peter Grimes" (in which Peter is portrayed as a character vastly different from the original); and Samuil Marshak's often wooden and uneven translations of Wordsworth's "Lucy" poems.

Warren U. Ober and Mara R. Wade, who prepared this collection for publication, would like to extend their warmest thanks to the persons who made it possible. First and foremost, we want to thank Professor Nuala Koetter, University Library, University of Illinois, who allowed us to scan the articles at Grainger Engineering Library and trained our research assistant, Carsten Wilmes, in the process of scanning and manipulating the texts. Our sincere thanks also go to Carsten Wilmes, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Illinois, whose considerable skills and tireless energy as a Research Assistant furthered this project at every turn as he read proof, made corrections, and formatted the papers for publication. His unflagging courtesy and ability to meet deadlines made him a joy to work with. Our gratitude also goes to the editors of the journals in which the sixteen articles made their first appearances. The editors--all of them without exception--responded to our requests for permission to reprint them here immediately, graciously, and positively. Once again, we want to thank Professor Malone for initially encouraging, and then publishing, our project, thereby giving the fruits of Kenneth Ober's scholarship, along with (as we hope) our own, a vigorous afterlife in the pages of Germano-Slavica. As Jurij D. Levin, the Russian scholar of literary translation, so aptly observes in his introduction to the history of Russian translation, "Translated literature in every new nation has had a very important share in the development of national self consciousness or [...] in the development of enlightenment and esthetic taste. For this reason works of literary history will no longer suffer from harmful one-sidedness only when much more attention is paid to translated literature than is the case now." (20)

Please note: For each article the editors as a rule have preserved the respective system for transliterating the Russian Cyrillic alphabet followed by the journal in which the article originally appeared.

MARA R. WADE

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

WARREN U. OBER

University of Waterloo

Notes

(1) Kenneth H. Ober, "Peter Emanuel Hansen and the Popularization of Scandinavian Literature in Russia 1888-1917," Diss U Illinois 1974.

(2) M.A. Goldschmidts Dagboger 2 vols. Copenhagen: Det danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab and C.A. Reitzel, 1987.

(3) Kenneth H. Ober, Contributions in Dutch, English, Faroese, German, Icelandic, Italian, and Slavic Languages to Danish Literary History 1925-1970: A Provisional Bibliography. Copenhagen: Det kongelige Bibliotek, 1976.

(4) M.I. Steblin-Kamenskij, The Saga Mind, trans. Kenneth H. Ober. Odense, Denmark: Odense University Press, 1973.

(5) Eleazar M. Meletinsky, The Elder Edda and Early Forms of the Epic, trans. Kenneth H. Ober. Vol. VI, Hesperides: Letterature e culture occidentali. Trieste: Edizioni Parnaso, 1998.

(6) Kenneth H. Ober, "Modern Icelandic Literature Abroad since 1970," Scandinavica, 27 (1988): 167-73; "The Translator and the Playwright: P. Em. Hansen's Translations of Ibsen on the Russian Stage," Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 6 (1979): 369-75; "The Incomplete Self in Pontoppidan's De Dodes Rige," Scandinavian Studies, 50 (1978): 396-402; the latter partially reprinted as "The Incomplete Self in Pontoppidan's De Dodes Rige" in Twentieth-Century Literary, Criticism (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1988), Vol. 29, 338-40: "P. Em. Hansen and P. Ganzen: A Danish Literary Missionary in Russia," Svantevit, 2 (1977/2): 5-17; "A Hansen (Ganzen) Bibliography of Translations, Books, and Articles in Russian 1885-1917," Svantevit, 3 (1977/2): 89-100; "Cyrillic Graffiti in the Cornell Icelandic Collection," The Cornell Library Journal, No. 6 (1968): 49-53; and "O. I. Senkovskij, Russia's First Icelandic Scholar," Scandinavian Studies, 40 (1968): 189-99.

(7) Kenneth H. Ober, Bibliography of Modern Icelandic Literature in Translation 1981-1992. Norwich: Norvik Press, 1997 (Scandinavica, Supplement, 1997); Bibliography of Modern Icelandic Literature in Translation: Supplement 1971-1980. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1990; and (with P.M. Mitchell) Bibliography of Modern Icelandic Literature in Translation. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975.

(8) Kenneth H. Ober, "Meir Goldschmidt and the Main Currents in 19th-Century Judaism," Nordisk Judaistik, 22 (2001): 7-45; "Henri Nathanseus gaeld til Meir Goldschmidt," Rambam. Tidskrift for jodisk kultur og forskning, 4 (1995): 21-27; '"Jeg vil ... leve som Poet og sore Oversaetter.' Meir Goldschmidt as a Translator," Scandinavian Studies, 66 (1994): 23-44; "A Forgotten Translation and a Forgotten Translator: Meir Goldschmidt's 'Maser" in French," Scandinavica, 32 (1993): 25-45; "Meir Goldschmidt og den tysk-jodiske ghetto-fortaelling," Rambam. Tidskrift for jodisk kultnr og forskning, 31 (1991/92): 82-93; "'Med saadanne Folelser skriver man en Roman': Origins of Meir Goldschmidt's En Jode," Scandinavica, 30 (1991): 25-39; "'Kjaere Goldschmidt--Venskabeligst H.C. Andersen,'" Anderseniana (1988): 53-76; "Meir Goldschmidt's 'Hebrew Legends': The Writer as Plagiarist?" Scandinavica, 22 (1983): 15-21; "Meir Goldschmidt's Unpublished English Novel," Scandinavian Studies, 52 (1980): 278-88; "Goldschmidt's English Novel Homeless," Orbis litterarum, 34 (1979): 113-23; and "Meir Goldschmidt as a Writer of English," Orbis litterarum, 29 (1974): 231-44.

(9) Kenneth H. Ober, Meir Goldschmidt. Boston: Twayne, 1976.

(10) Meir Goldschmidt, A Jew, trans. Kenneth H. Ober. New York: Garland, 1990.

(11) On 26 October 1994 the German radio station WDR 3 broadcast a half-hour program based on Kenneth Ober's edition of Meir Goldschmidt's diaries. On 11 and 16 April 1995 the University of Illinois Public Radio station WILL broadcast a recording of his reading of parts of Heine's Rabbi of Bacharach in his translation on a Passover program produced by Michael Rothe.

(12) P.M. Mitchell and Kenneth H. Ober, trans, and eds., The Royal Guest and Other Classical Danish Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977: and "Bjertagen/Bewitched," by Meir Goldschmidt, in Anthology of Danish Literature, ed. F.J. Billeskov Jansen and P.M. Mitchell. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971, 242-61.

(13) Kenneth H. Ober, "L.M. Benjamin Rothschild, le fondateur oublie de la bibliotheque de l'A.I.U," Les Cahiers de l'Alliance Israelite Universelle (Paris), N.S., no. 14 (June 1996): 2-4 (9 cols.).

(14) Kenneth H. Ober, Die Ghettogeschichte: Entstehung und Entwicklung einer Gattuag. Wolfenbuttel: Lessing-Akademie; Gtittingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2001.

(15) Kenneth H. Ober, "Nathan Samuely: A Forgotten Writer in a Neglected Genre," Shofar, 18 (2000): 70-81; and "1905. Karl Emil Franzos's masterpiece Der Pojaz is published posthumously," Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096-1996, ed. Sander L. Gilman & Jack Zipes. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1997, 268-72.

(16) Kenneth H. Ober, "The Jewish Danish-English-French Philanthropist L.M. ('Benjamin') Rothschild: A Documentary Family History" and "The German Jewish Ghetto Story: A Handbook."

(17) Kenneth H. Ober, "A View from the Parterre: Meir Goldschmidt (1819-1887) as a Critic of German Theater," Thalia Germanica (accepted for publication).

(18) Their Fleming article has also been republished as "Mosskaw/Moskva: Sumarokov's Translations of Fleming's Sonnets," Literary. Criticism from 1400-1800, Vol. 104. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2004. See also their article on the translation of a seventeenth-century German drama into Danish: "Martin Opitz's Judith and Mogens Skeel's Dansktalende Judith," Scandinavian Studies, 61 (1989): 1-11.

(19) Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator," trans. Harry Zohn, The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) 16.

(20) See "Puskin and Southey: Russia's Greatest Poet Translates England's Poet Laureate" in this issue.