Laura Freeburn Translations LLC

Category: History

  • RIP Ray Furness

    The world recently lost an inspiring teacher and all-round excellent person: Prof. Raymond Furness of the University of St. Andrews.

    He was the first German tutor I met at St. Andrews, at a reception for overseas students. I saw “German” on his name  tag and said, “Oh!” but when he turned my way I came over all skittish and bolted across the room. Luckily our paths crossed again and he asked me in his usual booming voice what I was studying  — he was of course very happy to hear (faintly) that it was German. He asked me about myself and I mentioned my Shetland sheepdog; in every significant conversation we had over the next 6 years, he would ask, “How is your little dog, Tuppence?”

    He was our tutor for first-year literature and I’ll never forget the day when, about 10 minutes into class, he realized none of us had actually read the assigned book. He paused and looked at each of us in turn. “Yes, you’re naughty children, aren’t you?” he said, “Well, no need to waste my time with you, I’m going to the pub.” And he put his coat on and walked over to The Central, leaving us to exchange sheepish glances.

    If you passed a room where he was teaching, you knew it because some over-the-top comment like “I MEAN LADIES! WOULD YOU REALLY WANT TO SHARE YOUR HUSBAND WITH A DEAD MAN??!?” would be distinctly audible through the door.

    His German Expressionism class was a highlight for most honours students, who really got what they came for on the days when he read aloud from Georg Kaiser’s Gas or Arnolt Bronnen’s Vatermord.

    In my third year, at a dinner for students in another tutor’s Nietzsche module, someone called him a misogynist so I popped by during his office hours soon afterwards to say, “Hi, Professor Furness, are you a misogynist?” He said he loved women and to prove it, he invited me in for several glasses of sherry and picked my brain for gossip, which was exactly what I had been hoping for.

    Ray Furness was in tune with everything that was chthonic, decadent, fatalistic, grandiose, disjointed, or existentially troubling in German arts and letters. You could rely on him to know everything about every famous German or Austrian who had ever gone mad or shot himself in the head. But he was a very nice person. If there’s a heaven, I’m sure he is there playing ping-pong with Max Schreck…or something like that.

    Yours truly with the professor at his retirement party (Siegfried’s funeral march was playing in the background)

    Books by Ray Furness

     

  • On the German standard of living (ca. 1960)

    As a graduate student, my mother had to take some German and her textbook was Deutsch für Amerikaner by C.R. Goedsche and Meno Spann, published in 1960. I’ve been leafing through it off and on.

    This week’s fiction in The New Yorker is all about people trying to express themselves in an intermediate German class, so this might be a good moment to offer the Internet an excerpt from Deutsch für Amerikaner. Here Fred Fletcher, a Minnesotan studying in Germany, and his pals Bill and Larry discuss household appliances and other fascinating topics with their German friend Wilhelm. (Translation mine – this is a hasty translation where the stilted style of the original will come through. It’s a foreign-language textbook, after all. The stiffness of expression is part of the charm.)

    ***

    Bill: Of course I am homesick. I want to see skyscrapers again and eat in a restaurant with air conditioning, and last winter in my often-cold room, I dreamed of our beautiful centrally heated houses in Wisconsin.

    Wilhelm: You could also complain that we Germans often don’t have a telephone in our houses yet, no refrigerators, washing machines, televisions or whatever else the comforts of modern life demand. In America, of course, you have all that in almost every house.

    Bill: And why do you not have it here in Germany?

    Fred: You must ask “not yet” because it won’t be long before the Germans also have everything we have in America. It’s only a question of time. The old houses in Germany do look romantic, but it’s hard or impossible to modernize them. In the new houses central heating, air conditioning, etc. are being built in, and they’re springing up like mushrooms.

    Wilhelm: You talk as if Germans were Americans. But we have our cultural traditions and you aren’t familiar with them. Perhaps the German does not wish to go along with material progress. Have you ever thought of that?

    Fred: I have considered this question in detail and am convinced that the German will not resist modern progress. He wants our standard of living and with this standard of living he will change his life, he will Americanize it.

    Wilhelm: We Germans are proud of our wine, which generations of vintners have cultivated through the centuries. For us, that is part of a high standard of living. You Americans are proud of your bathtubs.

    Fred: A shiny enamel bathtub into which hot and cold water flow in unlimited quantities is just as much a cultural product as a good Rhine wine that has almost two thousand years of tradition behind it.

    […]

    Larry:  …it’s nice that some young German man, instead of spending hours in a night club, puts his skis over his shoulders and goes to the Alps with a friend or girlfriend. Such a young man is healthy, strong, has a feeling for nature and […] muscles, and his girlfriend likes him or loves him because he is “a natural person.”

    Fred: […] Why didn’t you add that this girl’s mother does the laundry by hand because that’s how Grandma did it, that the girl doesn’t wear makeup like American girls, etc.? Let me tell you something. This girl will soon buy herself a washing machine. In a fashion journal influenced by America she will learn how she has to put on makeup and do her hair to show more “glamour” (there’s no German word for that) and then she will prefer a slim young man who takes her to a night club in his sports car to the romantic with his strong muscles and his deep feeling for nature.

    ***

    Well! Sorry, Germans of 1960: The American way of life is coming for you!

     

  • Monks + cheese

    An update on the curious case of mendicant friars and the moral dangers of collecting cheese (see this previous post): here is a story that appears in Geschichte der öffentlichen Sittlichkeit in Deutschland (History of public morality in Germany):

    http://</a

    Basically, a friar goes round the farms begging for cheese and eggs, and at one house the farmer’s wife tells him her daughter Grete is in bed with a thorn in her foot. So he offers to go up and do something about it. Mother agrees, then hears Grete screaming and shouts “Let him do it, daughter, it’ll help!” But after he leaves she realizes he wasn’t taking out the thorn but doing something unmentionable to poor Gretl. So she (Mom) goes out with a wheel of cheese and a club. When she sees the friar she hides the club behind her back and shouts, “Come get another piece of cheese!” He doesn’t fall for her trick, but he does decide to keep his distance from then on. A cautionary tale for all.

  • Reformation Flame War

    In honor of the 500th anniversary of Luther’s 95 Theses, here is my heavily redacted version of a Reformation-era dialogue by Hans Sachs, namely

    A dialogue on the hypocrisy of the religious and their vows, through which, despising the blood of Christ, they presume to become holy.

    in which Hans the cobbler and Peter the baker amuse themselves by trolling an unsuspecting Franciscan friar who just wants some candles. These dialogue pamphlets dramatizing theological disputes were very popular in the 16th century. Here the Franciscan friar attempts to defend traditional Catholic religious orders against Protestant objections. Like most Reformation dialogues, this one contains lengthy passages where the speakers just sling competing Bible verses at each other. I’ve cut most of that out and kept the fun stuff. Although this is a loose translation, it’s still fairly accurate. Enjoy!

    Monk[1]: Peace be with you, dear brethren! Of your charity please give me some alms for the poor barefoot Franciscans, we need candles for singing and reading.

    Peter: I don’t give to strong beggars like you and begging is forbidden. In Deut. XV God says, “There shall be no beggars among you.” I give candles to my poor neighbors who use them for WORKING. Get a job!

    Monk: Ah, you must be Lutheran.

    Peter: Nope, Evangelical.[2]

    Monk: Then yeesh, do what the Gospel tells you and give to anyone who asks of you. Matthew V, Luke VI, and so on…

    Hans: He just roasted you with Bible verses, Peter.

    Peter: OK fine, I got roasted. Here brother Heinrich, behold this penny which I will give you for the Lord’s sake and which you can exchange for whatever candle suits your fancy.

    Monk: Oh, God protect me, I’m not allowed to take money! My order forbids it.

    Hans: Who set that order up?

    Monk: Our holy father Francis.

    Hans: Oh, so Francis is your father? Well GUESS WHAT – Christ says in Matthew XXIII to call no man “father,” for you have but one father who is in heaven!

    Monk: Arrgh, we know that. But he taught us the way a good father teaches his children.

    Hans: Then I guess he’s your master and you can’t call any man “master” either, according to Christ in that same chapter, and Christ says again in John’s Gospel that he is the way the truth and the life, which isn’t really relevant but I feel like I need more Bible verses to back up my argument.

    Monk: But Francis didn’t just make things up himself, he took them from the Holy Gospel.

    Hans: Where in the Gospel does it say you can’t touch money? I can give you the opposite example. Remember when Christ told Peter to catch a fish and open it up and there was a coin inside? That was amazing.

    Monk: But he also said not to build up treasure on earth, and you cannot serve God and mammon, and Luke XII, and then there’s the camel and the eye of the needle, and sell all you have and give it to the poor…there you have it.

    Hans: You talk the talk, Mr. No-Shoes, but do you walk the walk?

    Monk: Um, yes? We don’t take any money, which means we don’t have any. Not even a little.

    Hans: But outside your cloister walls you have plenty of friends taking and spending money for you…princes who build your snazzy monasteries and pay thousands of ducats for you to buy a cardinal’s hat. Don’t think we haven’t noticed. If that’s not called “building up treasure on earth”, I don’t know what is.

    Peter: It’s called playing your greed under your little hat.

    Monk: OK what the – look, fine, we have people who look after the money for us. But we don’t pay any attention to money. We focus on our religious duties.

    [extended conversation about money, including the accusation that money donated to religious orders is ultimately being stolen from The Working Man]

    Hans: …and you’re no use to God or man.

    Monk: It might make sense to say that if we didn’t spend LITERALLY ALL OUR TIME SERVING GOD!!!

    Hans: You’re good at going to church, not so great at doing actual works of mercy.

    Monk: Come to our monastery tomorrow at noon! You’ll see a whole pile of poor people getting fed.

    Peter: Yeah, you give them the food you don’t want, like soup and peas, then you sit in your own refectory eating delicious fish soup and vegetables with no sense of shame!

    [boring section cut]

    Monk: Well God bless you, young men, but I have to move on now to someone who might actually give us something.

    Hans: Wait, wait Brother Heinrich! One more thing.

    Monk: WHAT

    Hans: Do you keep your vow of chastity?

    Monk: Yes, why not? If we didn’t know how to keep that vow, we wouldn’t make it.

    Peter: The farmer’s daughters really get a taste of your chastity when you’re out collecting cheese.[3]

    Monk: Show me where it says that in our rule!

    Peter: I don’t mean just you guys…it’s all the mendicants who are out there collecting cheese.

    Monk: Don’t judge the whole crop by a few weeds.

    Hans: My concern is that if you don’t do things the natural way, you’ll end up getting into the freaky stuff….

    Monk: That’s why we discipline our flesh. Our whole rule is designed to curb the desires of the flesh. Not just by fasting, but other kinds of discipline too.

    Peter: Tell us about it…

    Monk: Happy to! We don’t wear any linen underwear, but we do wear rope belts, we go barefoot in open shoes[4], we don’t wear any hair on our heads, we go our entire lives without taking a bath – seriously, until we die – we don’t sleep on feathers, we never take our clothes off, we eat meat at not quite half our meals, we don’t eat off of tin[5], we have to be quiet A LOT, we have to stand and kneel in the choir for an hour or five every day, and pray in the middle of the night.

    Peter: Oh yeah? Well the guys and I work really hard every day for crappy food and then we get to bed late, and in the morning the kids are already up yapping by matins…I think my rule is harder than yours.

    [interminable argument cut]

    Peter: Look Brother Heinrich, I have two candles for you. But don’t use them to read Scotus or Bonaventure. Read the Bible and eventually God will enlighten you. And don’t be offended by the way we jumped down your throat and harangued you for an hour when you could have been out collecting more candles.

    Monk: It’s OK, dear brethren. God be with you.

    Peter: AMEN.

    Epilogue: Peter and Hans were saved by faith alone and went to Heaven even though they were jerks. Their many descendants refuse to go to bed when somebody is wrong on the Internet.

    Brother Heinrich asked the prior if he could be put on cheese collecting duty next time. He is still in Purgatory.

    [1] Actually a friar.

    [2] The idea here is probably not that Peter disapproves of Luther, but that “Evangelical” is a better term with more legitimacy, since it basically means “a follower of the Gospel” (as opposed to a follower of one specific guy).

    [3] “keß” in my edition, “kes” in another one. I think that must be cheese… Collecting cheese was apparently such an occasion of sin that Sachs wrote a jaunty little couplet about it: “Mein keuschheit ich frei halten tet / wenn ich nicht kās zuo samlen het” (“I’d keep my chastity with ease / if I didn’t go out collecting cheese”). For more on cheese and chastity, see here.

    [4] So…not actually barefoot?

    [5] “essen aus kainem zin”?

  • “Five Germanys”

    Recent events have inspired me to re-read Fritz Stern‘s book Five Germanys I have known (grammar nerds will note that it is “Germanys,” not “Germanies,” because the usual plural spelling rules don’t apply to proper names), specifically the middle section about nurturing, preserving, and defending liberal democracy.

    Reading this book ten years ago, I skimmed that part thinking, “Yeah, mm-hmm, whatever.” But it all seems terribly relevant now. Take his comments on the student revolts of ’68, when he was teaching at Columbia University:

    I was angry at the jubilant desecration of the university, and afraid that we were betraying our patrimony. […] I was afraid of the radical youths who were intoxicated by their own rhetoric, enthralled by the initial successes of violence, and convinced of their historic role as iconoclasts. […] Their disruptions were not cost-free: I feared a massive backlash, a reaction by conservative yahoos who would feel justified in their paranoid hatred of liberal (and expensive) institutions.

    How relevant.

    Then there was a rising desire on the right for repressive law and order, along with a “professed faith in the virtues of hard work and economic individualism, and contempt for the welfare state that ‘coddled’ the weak…a new version of Social Darwinism, bloody-minded if economically effective.” And there were advocates of la politique du pire — “that delusionary policy that holds that the worse things go, the better for radicals. I have often fought with these self-righteous ‘wreckers,’ who seldom realize how bad and irredeemable things can get.”

    Ditto.

    Having fled Nazi Germany for an America that was — on the whole and despite its economic woes — confident, well-meaning and optimistic, with a president who insisted the only thing to fear was Fear itself, Stern was wary of radicals on the left and right. Like G. K. Chesterton, he understood that it was worthwhile, and an adventure, to keep your horse running straight when it is tempted to veer onto the paths that lead to insane extremes.

    He gave an interview to Greenpeace magazine in January 2016, a few months before his death at age 90. The interview seems to be available only in German, so I’ve taken the liberty of translating an excerpt here:

    Historian Fritz Stern: “We are facing an era of fear.”

    GP: Is Europe moving too far to the right?

    FS: I fear it is. I believe we are facing an era of fear, widespread fear — the fear that can be exploited by the right. And you can already see in the example of Poland how fragile freedom is. It is shocking how quickly an authoritarian system is being built up in Poland. […] And as an American citizen I am also deeply concerned.

    GP: About what comes after Barack Obama?

    FS: Precisely. On the whole I’m an admirer of Obama and it was a great achievement on the part of this country to have elected him twice. But the current situation is so serious, so destructive, so dysfunctional, that it can only make you worry.

    GP: You mean Donald Trump?

    FS: Trump is the best example of the dumbing-down of the country and the appalling role of money. An absolutely amoral guy who flaunts his money and ignorance. I arrived in this country when Franklin Roosevelt was president. That someone like Trump, who is a nobody apart from money and monstrous ambition and ugliness – that he would not only put himself forward but would even be accepted by many people as a candidate, is simply beyond comprehension. 

    GP: What has changed in American society?

    FS: I’ve already spoken of dumbing-down. That is due in large part to the media and to the fact that there are fewer and fewer objective journalists. Most people can choose the ones who preach what they want to hear. […] A certain kind of new religiosity, which has very little to do with true religiosity, is also on the rise. I believe we are facing a new illiberal age. And for someone who dedicated his life to a certain liberalism, those are sad tidings. It’s a decline.

    RIP Prof. Stern. If there’s anything I can do to keep that horse on the trail, I’ll do it.

     

  • Nazi Summer Camp

    In 2015 someone contacted me from Radiolab asking for help with research for the episode “Nazi Summer Camp“. This was quite a thrill because I’ve long been grateful to this fun and informative show for preventing my children from bickering on long car trips.

    What they wanted was a summary of one chapter of a German book about POW camps in the US during the Second World War. They were still deciding which aspects to focus on, so they were gathering information from different sources. In the end, no specific information from my summary made it into the show, but I was happy to be part of the research process.

    The chapter gave a detailed account of German POW life at Fort Hunt, source of many anti-torture anecdotes. When James Mattis told Trump, “Give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I’ll do better” than the torturers, he was building on a tradition that goes back to the easygoing interrogators at Fort Hunt.

    Although POWs were not tortured there, they were subjected to a lot of secret surveillance. Their cells were bugged and monitored by a team of eavesdroppers, many of whom were Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria. They worked in shifts and noted the POWs’ conversations by hand on forms, often in a sort of shorthand, but quite complete. When the conversations turned to especially relevant topics, the monitors started a tape recorder. With regard to what should be recorded, the adage was, “When in doubt, press button.” At the end of their shift the monitors transcribed important passages from their recordings. They learned precise coordinates of numerous bomb targets in Germany, technological details about various weapons, vehicles and machines, and much about the structures and practices of the Wehrmacht. What they learned the most about were the individual German soldiers.

    I enjoyed translating the transcripts that were quoted in the book. Here is a soldier explaining to his cellmate what the formal interrogations are like:

    G: So one of those guards comes charging in holding a piece of paper and calls out someone’s name, but always with English pronunciation. And then you have to go out, and then you go through the halls to a room and usually an officer is sitting there. And you can’t do a Hitler salute there.

    P: No, no.

    G: And then he asks a ton of questions. For example: Are you a member of the party? What do you think of Adolf Hitler? What do you think of the Jewish question? And then he wants to know other stuff.

    Most prisoners felt they were treated fairly and enjoyed the plentiful food and relatively comfortable conditions. However, some reacted with deep distrust. Helmut Engelbrecht told his cellmate: “Like I just told you, this is how Nordic people squeeze it out of you. The Russians, they let you starve and then cold shower, hot shower, cold shower, hot shower, until you’re half mad and you’ll tell them everything willingly. But here they try it with devious tricks, nice on the outside and on the inside – the craziest techniques and listening systems and whatever other kinds of shit.”

    Prisoners were not supposed to know they were being recorded, but some guessed. 22-year-old submarine lieutenant Peter Leffler from Braunschweig explained to his skeptical cellmate:

    Leffler: They’re recording our conversation now.

    Cellmate: Oh, I don’t believe that. The thing with recordings, that would cost a whole lot.

    Leffler: What do you mean, it doesn’t cost a lot to make records.

    Cellmate: OK, listen, it’s theoretically possible but pretty difficult in practice. Imagine, we’ve been here together for a long time, with a record running 12-15 hours?

    Leffler: No, there’s someone sitting by it, listening, and whenever it gets interesting, he turns it on.

    Cellmate: Oh, well that’s…I get it.

    Leffler: In Danzig I was at a broadcasting studio once, and this is exactly what the rooms look like.

    Meanwhile, SS Oberscharführer Fritz Swoboda willingly told his cellmate about how he and his men had shot unarmed American POWs on the western front. Shortly afterwards he thought to ask:

    Swoboda: Could there be a microphone hidden in this room?

    Cellmate: Yeah, nobody knows. But I have nothing to hide.

    Swoboda: No, I just wondered. I don’t actually think there is one.

    Officers, men with specialist technical knowledge, or soldiers who had been involved in intelligence were the most likely to suspect bugging. Their cellmates often didn’t believe them. One simple infantryman responded, “Where’s a built-in microphone here? Where would something like that be? […] You’re crazy, that’s a myth.” A marine lieutenant was sure it was impossible: “Here? No, there are no microphones here, I know. […] Look, some man would have to sit there all day, listening all the time. Or they have to broadcast it by radio, onto records. Wouldn’t work, you can’t do it.” Most discussions about eavesdropping came to that conclusion: “There’s no microphone here.”

    They were there, and sometimes they picked up conversations that ran like a film script:

    J: If only we could get out of this shithole and back to Germany.

    H: They’ll get nothing out of me. They could keep me here a year and they wouldn’t know more than they do now. And in the meantime the war would be over and they’d have to let me go.

    J: You know, last night I woke up suddenly and I thought, hey, what’s going on? I was at home. I saw it all so clearly.

    H: Watch out. (guard going by)

    J: He’s gone. You have to be careful here, like a lynx.

    H: Yes, yes.

    J: Open the window again.

    H: Man, then it gets so cold in here.

    J: It’s just as cold in here. When you touch the radiator, you stick to it. It’s that cold. Are you hungry?

    H: It’s OK.

    J: You’ll start to feel it tomorrow and the day after.

    H: I believe you. When did they take you out?

    J: Yesterday.

    H: And you haven’t been back in?

    J: No, and he asked me if I wanted to go to a Nazi or Anti-Nazi camp. Then I said it was the same to me – whether I was a Nazi or Anti-Nazi, as a German I wasn’t going to tell him anything. He could do whatever he wanted. Then he locked me up here. But let’s not get down in the dumps. We can thank God things came out this well for us.

    H: Yes, I was lucky.

    J: So was I.

     

     

  • The Lady in the Hymnal

    I grew up in a mainline Protestant church, where my family always spent the organist’s intro to a given hymn checking on who wrote the words, who composed the music, what country they were from, and when they lived. If we spotted someone who was famous outside of church, like Haydn or Arthur Sullivan, there was a chance for some gleeful pointing and whispering before we belted out the first few bars.

    Do this often enough and you will find one name popping up with alarming frequency: Catherine Winkworth.

     

     

    Germany is to hymnals what China is to Wal-Mart. Remove all the German tunes from an old-fashioned hymn book and you will be left with a sad little pamphlet. And in many cases, it was Catherine Winkworth who did the translation that allows us to sing them in English. Occasionally I have heard a really solid German hymn tune and wondered if I could be the one to provide an English text for it, but no – Catherine Winkworth had beaten me to the job, every time.

    So I fell to wondering: who was this lady? I found her book of hymn translations, Lyra Germanica, on Amazon. My brother was kind enough to buy it for me for Christmas:

    guinea pig provided for size reference

    It contains the translations and a preface by her. To learn about her life, however, I had to look elsewhere. A few websites offered basic biographical information, but to know what kind of a person she really was, you need to go to Google Books and read the memoirs of her sister, Susanna. In summarizing them, I was going to say, “I read them so you don’t have to!” But in fact, this is an extremely interesting book, so if you enjoy my summary, go read the whole thing.

    Born in London in 1837, Catherine was raised in a family of devout Evangelicals with a rural background reminiscent of a George Eliot novel, except that none them turned out to be an odious hypocrite. Her maternal grandfather was banished from home by his father at age 18 “for becoming a disciple of Whitefield, and refusing to join in any worldly amusements.” Catherine herself was a good, intelligent and pious child. At 8, she was noticed by a family friend sitting with a Bible on her lap and reading the Sermon on the Mount aloud to her younger siblings. “What, Kate,” asked the friend, “Reading the Bible to your brothers?” “Yes,” she replied, “But I try to choose the parts that are suited to their capacity.”

    Her family valued education very highly and was well connected in religious and literary circles. Catherine and Susanna were passionate about learning everything they possibly could in theology, the sciences, and humanities. Their mother died rather suddenly after preparing too vigorously for a dinner party. They ran the household until their father took a second wife, a superfan of Lord Byron who apparently excelled at her hobby of making realistic dollhouse furniture.

    This was their cue to leave home and have some adventures – Catherine went with an Aunt to Dresden, where she had lessons in German and music, as well as visiting art galleries, the theater, and the opera (both of the latter being dominated, at that time, by members of the Devrient family, whose acting troupe Susanna’s book describes as “the best actors of Germany, perhaps for tragedy the best of any country”). Upon her return to England Catherine was in a state of intellectual ferment: “Her early beliefs had been rudely shattered and she was at this epoch much inclined to replace them by the worship of Art and Culture. Goethe was her chief instructor and guide, and her philosophy was a chaos.” However, she eventually settled into an ordered Anglican existence in the mold of Charles Kingsley.

    It was Susanna who first expressed an interest in translation, specifically a book on the life of Niebuhr. When she mentioned this to the German diplomat Baron von Bunsen, he jumped at the opportunity to mentor her, encouraging her not only to translate the book but to add original research of her own. To this end he carted her off to Bonn and made her do scary things like ask the world’s foremost Niebuhr expert questions in German at dinner in front of other distinguished Germans. On the plus side, she got to waltz with the Prince of Prussia.

    Shall we dance?

    Meanwhile, Catherine also tried her hand at German to English translation, including “some German hymns that Susie and I are fond of, and [I] don’t succeed very well, but I like doing it.” Soon she was translating a hymn a day and succeeding rather better. They were published as Lyra Germanica and sold out within two months. Fan mail poured in.

    “Mein liebes Fräulein Winckworth,” wrote Baron Bunsen, to whom the work was dedicated, “Das Herz treibt mich Ihnen Deutsch zu reden, da Sie mir meine deutschen Lieblingslieder, die heiligen Gesänge meines Volkes so herrlich verstanden und wiedergegeben haben.” The prominent Unitarian James Martineau thanked her for introducing them “to the English reader with the least possible drawback from passing out of their own language.”

    A typical letter from Catherine to Susanna from around the time she began translating:

    “First of all, I must read Mill’s Political Economy some day; and then I want to learn Latin and Greek and Drawing, and perhaps I shall have to translate, and then there will be occupation enough; and so as I said, I am very well satisfied with my prospects; though, according to the doctrines M. and Mrs. P. are preaching to me at the moment, I ought to be very unhappy, because I’m not married, nor likely to be at present. They have been going on at me so about it, in a regular married woman style, which I hate.”

    The Winkworth sisters never did marry, but they knew everybody: Charles Dickens (“has a very rapid decided way of talking, and is excessively full of fun and spirits”), Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini (“Well, altogether he is simply the most wonderful-looking man I ever saw in my life. He may be any height he likes, he is so thoroughly manly-looking, you do not think of it”), French socialist “little” Louis Blanc, Hungarian patriot Lajos Kossuth, Elizabeth Gaskell, John Ruskin, Robert and Elizabeth Browning, and Charlotte Brontë (“One feels that her life at least almost makes one like her books, though one does not want there to be any more Miss Brontës”), as well as everyone who was anyone in the English clergy, e.g. John Henry Newman’s younger brother Francis Newman (“a beautiful face and winning smile”) and F. D. Maurice (“I like him because he is so despotic”). They were highly active in the Sunday school movement, which in those days was much more significant than getting children to cut construction paper in a church basement.

    Film buffs used to enjoy playing “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” History buffs should start playing “Six Degrees of Catherine Winkworth.” In fact, I would wager that in every Victorian miniseries you’ve ever seen, there is a woman in the background who looks like an extra but is actually playing Catherine Winkworth. She’s one of the most important Victorian ladies no one – apart from the hymnal nerds – has ever heard of.

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