Don Karlos Author:Friedrich Schiller Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFACE. Mt may, perhaps, be advisable to state "in limine" my reasons, for thus offering a translation of so famous a literary performance, as the present Pi... more »ece of Schiller's , to the notice of my countrymen, after so long a period has elapsed since the publication of the original ; for in stating that half a century has elapsed since that time, I am only giving a natural cause for astonishment, why, when all his other dramatical pieces, with the exception of the Bride of Messina, have met with translators, some of them with no less then three (as Wilhelm Tell), Don Karlos alone should have been excepted—a production, which, perhaps, taken all in all, looks around in vain for its equal in the dramatic literature of Europe since the time of Shakspeare, with, possibly, the exception of Wal- lenstein. By translations I, of course, mean metrical ones — for to endeavour to transfuse the energy and fire of the original into a prose translation, would, indeed, be to all intents and purposes forcing Pegasus into the yoke, and would only have the effect (if effect it could have any) of dragging down the sub- I have made enquiries but in vain for a poetical version. In England I know that none has been published and the Paris Catalogues down to the end of 1836 contain no notice whatever of any one — neither do those of Leipsic. chapter{Section 4lime imagery and diction of the original into the ordinary trammels of every day life. Such however has been the fate of the Poem before us; it has only met with a prose translation professing to be as literal as possible. Yet this translation, spiritless and unfaithful as it is, is only that of the first edition of the play — an edition entirely and essentially different from that which the Author subsequently gave to the world. Yet ev...« less