Translating and Interpreting Conflict - it's me

John WilliamsAn inventive AgeHas wrought, if not with speed of magic, yetTo most strange issues. I have lived to markA new and unforeseen creation riseFrom out the labours of a peaceful LandWielding her potent enginery to frameAnd to produce, with appetite as keenAs that of war, which rests not night or day,Industrious to destroy!Freiligrath called this extract ‘The Manufacturing Spirit’. The second passageis headed ‘The Factory at Night’, and begins at line 170:… at the appointed hour a bell is heardOf harsher import than the curfew-knollThat spake the Norman Conqueror’s stern behest -A local summons to unceasing toil!Finally ‘The Working Classes’ begins at line 262: “Domestic bliss / (Or callit comfort, by a humbler name,) / How art thou blighted for the poor man’sheart!” (Wordsworth 1959: 268, 270-1, 273).Though the anthology contains many more poems that have liberalpolitical and social themes, Wordsworth appears in the main as a lyric poet ofnature and childhood. It is important to note, however, that in choosing topresent The Excursion as a poem that explored the politics of classengendered by the factory system, Freiligrath departed from Jacobsen’sreading of the poem. The Briefe an eine deutsche Edelfrau devotes an entirechapter to The Excursion, quoting from it at length. The passages Jacobsenchose, however, are very much in accord with the English Victorian readingof The Excursion, presenting it as a spiritual antidote to a view of the modernworld as a place in danger of becoming engulfed by secularised politicalopinion and the worship of materialism. In this reading Wordsworth’sphilosophical appeal to the natural world as a guide to religious belief andsocial conduct depoliticises the poet in a way Freiligrath was not prepared todo.Freiligrath’s declared intention (stated in the Introduction to the 1853edition of the Anthology) was that his collection of poetry should be “awelcome present to every lover of English poetry” in Germany, England andAmerica. Genteel and politically neutral as this may sound, however, theidiosyncratic choice of Excursion extracts alone illustrates that politicalmotivation born of the conflicts that marked the evolution of 19 th centuryGerman nationalism were never far from the surface in Freiligrath’s mind.Though The Rose, Thistle and Shamrock consisted of poems in English,the issue of translation remains inimical to the political agenda of conflictthat runs through Freiligrath’s career. The technical problems of translating194