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Neophilologus (2009) 93:369376 DOI 10.1007/s11061-009-9145-0
Sandro Jung
Published online: 19 March 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009
Abstract This essay contributes to the study of the reception of William Collinss poems on the continent in the 18th century and introduces a little known German translation of Collinss Oriental Eclogues by the Swiss poet, bookseller and engraver, Salomon Gessner. While focusing on the ways in which Gessner renders Collinss eclogues into German, I shall contextualise the translation in terms of Gessners own theory of the idyll. It is through this reading of Collins as a writer of idylls, rather than as the author of the odes for which he was celebrated by the Romantics, that Gessner popularised the poet in Germany and Switzerland.
Keywords William Collins (17211759) Salomon Gessner (17301788)
Oriental Eclogues Translation into German Reception
Modern scholars examine William Collins (17211759) primarily as the author of Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1746) and only infrequently consider the poem for which (at least, until the 1760s) he was best known in Britain. His poems were included in all major poetry anthologies from Robert Dodsleys Collection of Poems by Several Hands to Alexander Chalmerss The Works of the British Poets, were read on the Continent but were not generally popularised by means of translations. This essay introduces a translation of Collinss Persian Eclogues (1742)republished as Oriental Eclogues (1757)which was produced in Switzerland and which helped to popularise Collinss poem and the poets reputation as an important writer of pastoral. I will examine the ways in which Collinss use of pastoral was theorised by the translator of the Eclogues, Salomon Gessner, and (briey) how his notion of the idyll was translated transculturally by
S. Jung (&)
School of English, Sociology, Politics and Contemporary History, The University of Salford, Crescent House, Salford, Greater Manchester M5 4WT, UKe-mail: [email protected]
Salomon Gessner and Collinss Oriental Eclogues
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370 S. Jung
John Langhorne and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the former the editor of the rst collected edition of Collinss poems of 1765 and the latter an admirer of Collinss verse, especially the Ode on the Poetical Character.1
In the Preface to the Oriental Eclogues, Collins claimed that he was merely translating a series of four Persian eclogues, attempting to render the...