'Yew Trees' (written in 1803 under the title of 'Ewtrees') marks Freiligrath's fascination with a poem that links patriotism to the poet's love of the natural world. Jacobsen had included this poem in his Briefe, quoting it (as was his normal method) in English,then translating it into a prose paragraph in a footnote. Wordsworth first published 'Yew Trees' in his 1815 Collected Edition (Wordsworth 1975: 146-7). The opening lines draw attention to the role played by the trees in supplying the longbows that had been used with such devastating effect against Germany's traditional foe:
There is a Yew-trec, pride of Lorton Vale.
Of its own darkness, as it stood of yore:
ich to this day tandsigle, ithe mt
Not loth to funish weapons for the bands
Of Umfraille or Percy when they marched
To Scotland's Heaths: or those that crossed the sea
And drew their sounding boughs at Azincotr.
Perhaps at earlier Crecy, or Poictiers. (111-8)
I am tempted to think that a reading of these lines was sufficient to set Freiligrath on the task of translation. As with Hemans' The Forest Sanctuary, Wordsworth's 'Yew Trees' takes its meaning from an idea that would be profoundly appealing to a German readership. The forest had long been a powerful symbol of German national identity. Commenting on early nineteenth century German literature and art, Simon Schama writes. "Religion and patriotism, antiquity and the future - all came together in the Teutonic romance of the woods. Figures asleep for centuries might stir into life, not least Germania herself'. Elsewhere he points out that "by the time the German forest was being identified as the authentically native German scenery,much of it was fast disappearing under the axe", a fact that intensified the process of recreating the German forest through the "literary and visual imagination" (Schama 1996: 95,107). The tree, a thing of beauty in its native landscape, may here become also a source of weaponry when it is time to go to war for your country. It is even possible that Freiligrath saw Wordsworth's Yew tree as a specific foil to Hemans' pessimistic comparison between an oak tree overwhelmed with vines and the failing political health of a nation in Part One, stanza xi of The Forest Sanctuary. I then imagine him becoming increasingly exasperated with Wordsworth as he struggled to translate the rest of the piece, determined, as was his practice (unlike Jacobsen) to retain the formal structures of rhythm and metre in his source text, and in this instance preserve one of Wordsworth's most interminably convoluted sentences that runs from line 14 for the remaining 24 lines of the poem. The act of translation has resulted in the poem itself becoming a site of conflict, the final,tangible evidence for which is that the reader is presented with four extra lines of German 'Yew Tree'!
Arguably, Freiligrath is here adopting Schleiermacher's preferred strategy as an Übersetzer translating an artistic text. In his Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens of 1813, Schleiermacher recommends that the reader be given "the same impression that he as a German would receive reading the work in the original language" (Munday 2001: 27-8); the intention is to adopt an 'alienating' method of translation. Jeremy Munday summarises this as valorising the foreign and transferring it into the target language (ibid: 29). However, as the four extra lines of Freiligrath's 'Yew Tree' indicate, there remain complex tensions between rendering Wordsworthian blank verse poetic form into German, and reproducing at the same time anything like a faithfully Wordsworthian meaning. Here are the first eight lines of Wordsworth's poem, now become nine:
Ein Eibenbaum, der Stolz des Lortonthals -
Bis diesen Tag steht einsam er, inmitten
Des eignen Dunkels, wie er vormals stand,
Als er den Schaaren Umfraville's und Percy's
Eh' sic nach Schottlands Haiden gingen, willig
Geschosse reichte: oder jenen, die
Das Meer durchKreuzten, und bei Azincourt.
Viellcicht auch friher noch. bei Poitier
Und Crecy,dumpf die Bogen tonen liessen
Freiligrath's German retains - as far as possible -the iambic pentameter discipline of the English blank verse line. Though blank verse is not in itself a problematic discipline for the German language, translating iambic pentameters from English, specifically when written in the way Wordsworth tended to manipulate the form, does clearly begin to create difficulties. Faced with the need to concede to an appropriate German word order, Freiligrath is prompted to relocate family and place names. The extra line that turns Wordsworth's eight into Freiligrath's nine in this passage begins to grow from line 4. By lines 6 and 7 it has become inevitable, by which time it is also clear that the conflicting demands of grammatical construction are putting increasing strain on the relationship between the source and target texts. This becomes very evident at the end of the passage, when Wordsworth chooses to disrupt the iambic beat in line 8, a process initiated by his use of the word "earlier" which problematises the scansion of "Crecy", and leaves "or Poictiers" to be read as though they were the final words of a prose sentence. Dismantling the metre in this way was a device Wordsworth did occasionally employ (it was a technique upon which Byron had poured scorn in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers); here it throws into dramatic relief the expansive, exclamatory lyric flow of the following two lines, where every syllable counts: "Of vast circumference and gloom profound / This solitary Tree!" Confronted with Wordsworth's metrical irregularities in line 8,
Freiligrath works against his source text in a bid to retain a metrically orthodox line, moving "Poictiers" up to the previous line, bringing in the reference to "Crecy" after it, and finishing his ninth line with one easily assimilated extra syllable in "liessen". At the same time he translates Wordsworth's "drew their sounding bows" (line 7 in the source text) in a way that locates it in its appropriate place for his German readership, almost preserving the metre Wordsworth had chosen very deliberately to disrupt.
Conflict is ubiquitous in Wordsworth's poem, but a resolution of conflict is also implicit in the poet's representation of the Yew Tree as both a source of weaponry, and a natural object whose longevity epitomises steadfastness and continuity. Conflict is present in Freiligrath's identification with Wordsworth's subject matter,the heroism of patriotic warriors preserving their country's liberty; but it is also present in the difference that evolves as the poem moves from its location among the trees of England, a historical narrative that celebrates English nationhood in the English language, to a Germanic form of linguistic and cultural expression.
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