Page:The Raven; with literary and historical commentary.djvu/72

 58 GERMAN.

German language has a capability of reproducing English thought possessed by no other national speech. Even poetry may be transferred from the one tongue to the other without, in many cases, any very great loss of beauty or power. The German language is richer in rhymes than the English, and in it finer shades of thought may be expressed; moreover, its capacity of combination—its wealth of compound words—is greater. These advantages are, however, to some extent, counterbalanced by various difficulties, such as the greater length of its words and their different grammatical positions.

Of the many English poems which have been effectively rendered into German by translators The Raven is one of the most remarkable examples of success. Among those who have overcome the difficulty of transferring the weird ballad from the one language to the other no one has, to our thinking, displayed greater skill than Herr Carl Theodor Eben, whose translation, Der Rabe, was published, with illustrations, in Philadelphia, in 1869.

Fräulein Betty Jacobson contributed a careful and cleverly executed translation of the to the Magazin fur die Liter atur des Auslandes for 28 February, 1880. Herr Eben's and Fräulein Jacobson's translations we give in full. Herr Niclas Müller, though a German by birth, a resident in the United