Page:Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field.djvu/196

 MARK AS A TRANSLATOR

Mark conquered Germany before he became one of the favorite literary sons of Austria. "I often wonder that they take to my brand of humor so well," he told me more than once in Vienna—"I mean AFTER MY GERMAN TRIUMPHS, for if Vienna Bookland hates anything worse than German Bookland, I haven't come across the likes of it. Each capital thinks itself a Boston and each calls the other Kalamazoo, or dead Indian Town.

"But I'm not ungrateful," continued Mark, "and to prove it, I studied hard and established the identity of the fatherlandish author whom both Vienna and Berlin admired (though nobody reads him, of course): Goethe."

"Goethe was Englished before I tackled him, but I happened on a passage in Faust that, it seemed to me, was not done justice to. So I summoned the family to a powwow and between us, and a heap of dictionaries, we rendered the disputed and immortal lines 'thus classic':

"Bayard" (Taylor) "would have burst with envy if he had lived long enough to see how 192