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Longfellow's “A Lay of Courage”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Andrew Hilen
Andrew Hilen*
Affiliation:
University of Washington, Seattle 5
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Extract

Some years ago bertram holland flanders discovered in an obscure literary journal called Wheler's Magazine, published in Athens, Georgia, a Longfellow “translation” entitled “A Lay of Courage,” which had not appeared among the poet's collected works. According to its heading the poem had been rendered from the Danish of Ove Mailing, a statesman and historian of some importance but of small reputation as a poet. When Flanders added the translation to Longfellow's bibliography nothing was known of the circumstances of its composition nor had the Danish original been identified. An examination of additional evidence now makes it clear that Longfellow did not translate the poem; that, in fact, he probably did not even consult Mailing's original; and that, actually, he took the product of an earlier translator and, altering it slightly, submitted it to the editor of Wheler's Magazine under his own name.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 67 , Issue 7 , December 1952 , pp. 949 - 959
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1952

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References

1 See “An Uncollected Longfellow Translation,” AL, vii (1935), 205-207.

2 Mailing (1746-1829) was known chiefly as the author of Store og gode Handlinger of danske, norske, og Holstenere (Kj⊘benhavn, 1777).

3 Sange til Brug for blandede Selskaber, samlede af Frederik Schaldemose (Ki⊘benhavn, 1816), pp. 22-23. Although I have been unable to find the poem in any other volume, I am informed by the librarian of the Royal Library in Copenhagen that “originally the poem is surely printed separately as a song for a company.”

4 Longfellow's predilection for literalism is well known. He pursued that quality particularly in his earlier adaptations from the Scandinavian—the excerpts from Tegnér's Frithiofs Saga, “The Children of the Lord's Supper,” etc. In 1867 he stated his attitude succinctly in a letter to John Neal: “A great many people think that a translation ought not to, be too faithful; that the writer should put himself into it as well as his original; that it should be Homer and Co., or Dante and Co.; and that what the foreign author really says should be falsified or modified, if thereby the smoothness of the verse can be improved. On the contrary I maintain … that a translator, like a witness on the stand, should hold up his right hand and swear to ‘tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’ ” (Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: With Excerpts from his Journals and Correspondence, ed. Samuel Longfellow [Boston and New York, 1891], iii, pp. 94-95).

5 Poems from the Danish, ed. A. Anderson Feldborg, tr. William Sidney Walker (Philadelphia, 1816), pp. 50-51. Since a London edition of the same work appeared in 1815, it is clear that Walker did not translate Mailing's poem from Schaldemose's collection. Perhaps Feldborg had obtained for him one of the original copies of the poem. See n. 3.

6 The collection is mentioned in his “Danish Language and Poetry” in The Poets and Poetry of Europe (Philadelphia, 1845), p. 63.

7 Longfellow studied Danish in Copenhagen in 1835 and seems always to have retained enough of the language for his own reading and translating purposes. Andrew Hilen, Longfellow and Scandinavia (New Haven, 1947), pp. 67-68.

8 See line 2. Longfellow changed Walker's literal translation of “Arbeid” to “hunger.”

9 I am indebted to Professor William Charvat of Ohio State University for the information that this notebook, in which Longfellow listed his income from various sources between 1840 and 1852, contains no such reference.

10 See below, p. 957.

11 Firing his splenetic broadsides from the pages of Burton's Gentlemen's Magazine, Graham's Magazine, the New York Evening Mirror, and the Broadway Journal, Poe accused Longfellow of being unduly influenced by Tennyson, Motherwell, and others, and of noticeably imitating, in “The Spanish Student,” a scene from his own “Politian.” The major attacks of the so-called “Longfellow War” occurred in 1845. See Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New York., 1902), xii, 41-106.

12 The few known facts of his life are to be found in Bertram Holland Flanders, Early Georgia Magazines (Athens, Ga., 1944), p. 111 et passim.

13 Wheler was the first Georgia editor to offer payment for contributions in anything but free subscriptions. See Early Georgia Magazines, p. 118.

14 In which Simms cautioned that “An Editor should be a gentleman, as a matter of course—governed by a high sense of propriety—calm, firm, steady, unobtrusive, and studiously just and careful in his judgments. His principles must be fixed and certain—his taste refined and always vigilant, and his manners—the manners of a periodical are, by the way, quite as essential as its morals—such as would grace the best bred courtier in the best society” (i, 6).

15 According to the Union List of Serials the only known copies of the Sept. and Oct. 1849 issues of the journal are in the N. Y. Public Library and the Duke Univ. Library.

16 The article is by “Jacques Journot” (D. H. Jacques, ca. 1825-77).

17 See Henry B. Woolf, “Longfellow's Interest in Old English,” Philologica: The Malone Anniversary Studies, ed. Thomas A. Kirby and Henry B. Woolf (Baltimore, 1949), pp. 286-288; Creighton Gilbert, “On Longfellow's Translation of a Michael Angelo Sonnet,” PQ, xxvii (1948), 57-62.

18 See Hilen, Longfellow and Scandinavia, p. 143.

19 See pp. 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 122. Longfellow also listed Walker's book in his bibliography of translators and sources, p. xxvi.

20 Poems of Places (Boston, 1876), viii, 95-96, 99-102, 102-104, 104-106, 183-184, 235-238.

21 First printed in Graham's Magazine, xxiv (1844), 156. See Hilen, pp. 78-79.

22 Lines 2 and 26 are exactly the same in both versions; 1. 28 is the same except for a comma added by Longfellow; cf. also ll. 4, 22, and 35 for similarities of expression not derived from the original.

23 Samuel Longfellow, Life, ii, 157.

24 For these biographical details see Life, ii, 154-157.