Tag Archive: 0anglo-german

Rilke wrote Das Marien-Leben at the castle at Duino, on the Italian Adriatic coast, in late 1911 and early 1912, just before he began work on what was to become the monumental Duineser Elegien.  In the preface to his translation in 1951, Stephen Spender notes that ‘Rilke wrote of the Marien-Leben as being “a little […]

Adelheid von Stolterfoth (1800–1875) was best known for her Rhenish poems; Goedeke called her ‘the true poet of the Rhine’. This is a copy of the first edition of The Rhenish Minstrel, published in Frankfurt by Carl Jugel in 1835, a version of her book Rheinischer Sagen-Kreis which Jugel had brought out the same year, […]

This is a copy of the first edition in German of William Gilpin’s famous Essay on Prints, ‘published anonymously in 1768, which had influence on the Continent, [and] contained his earliest definition of the Picturesque’ (Grove Art).  The translation is by Johann Jakob Volckmann (1732–1803).  A former owner here has created an index of the […]

I’ve always been interested in English printing abroad, or foreign-language printing in the UK. Here’s a nice example of the latter, from 1769 (rare, too; I presume it must have been printed in limited numbers): The author, Carl Gottfried Woide (1725–1790), who hailed from Leszno (German Lissa) in Poland, served as preacher to both the […]

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about language guides, and so thought I’d share another one I find particularly fascinating: This is the first edition of a book published by the Head of Modern Languages at Shrewsbury School in 1939: ‘Conversations about the New Germany—on and off parade’ (dust-jacket). The illustrations are by Phyllis […]

Kaspar Hauser (d.1833) was a foundling who became legendary in early nineteenth-century Europe; ‘the enigma of [his] origin, childhood, and early youth, and the known facts have aroused sustained interest … on the purely human, psychological, and social, as well as political, level’ ever since (Oxford Companion to German Literature). The author of this book, […]