This translation of Bürger's celebrated ballad was made by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in or about June 1844: he used at that date the signature "Gabriel Charles Rossetti." On May 12th of that year he had attained the age of sixteen. When he wrote it he supposed it to be a spirited and a good translation: I supposed the same, and continued to be extremely familiar with it for some years ensuing. After a certain space of time my brother neglected the performance, and it dropped entirely out of his thoughts. I heard no more of it, and probably never, after 1850 or some such date, set eyes upon any manuscript or any portion of it. No such manuscript was in my brother's possession at the date of his death, April 1882.

At last one of the few copies which in 1844 he made of the translation has turned up. It was included in a sale ​held by Messrs. Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge, on November 26th, 1899, and was there bought by Mr. Gilbert I. Ellis. On its being shown to me, I adhered to the opinion of my boyhood—that it is a good rendering, far rather than a bad one. I think it perfectly worthy of publication.

This appears to be the first translation (of any sort of importance) that Dante Rossetti ever undertook. In 1842 he had begun the study of German under Dr. Adolf Heimann, of University College, London,—a most kind friend as well as excellent instructor. My brother learned the language pretty well, but not so as to have an absolute and ready mastery over it. No doubt Dr. Heimann must have coached him up to some extent when his juvenile ambition pointed to Lenore. Soon afterwards he translated the Arme Heinrich of Hartmann von Aue—published in 1886 (in his Collected Works) as Henry the Leper; and I need not scruple to say that he made a capital thing of it. In October 1845 he began a version of the Nibelungenlied. It has perished, much to my regret; but, after the unforeseen resuscitation ​of Lenore, who knows but that the Nibelungenlied (only a few of the opening chaunts were translated) may also reappear? It is rather noticeable that these first essays in verse-translation should all have been from the German—a language which Rossetti never knew thoroughly, which, after early youth was past, he did not in any way keep up, and which he may be said to have all but wholly forgotten in course of time. His translations from the Italian—which he knew very well, and from the most childish years—began probably in 1845, not earlier than the period when he ventured upon the Nibelungenlied.

In his preface to the volume The Early Italian Poets (1861) Dante Rossetti explained his general views as to what are the obligations incumbent upon a translator. They amount to this: that a translator ought to be faithful, but is not bound down to being literal; he is compelled to make various mutual concessions between meaning and rhythm or rhyme; and in especial he must not turn a good poem into a bad one. In his version of Lenore he has conformed very fairly to these rules. Literal it most certainly is not, but it ​is moderately faithful. He allows himself (contrary to his original) the latitude of leaving lines 1 and 3 in each stanza unrhymed and of lengthening lines 7 and 8 from three feet to four. I myself regard this latter change as a decided improvement to the ear: but my opinion is not much to the point. The most salient modification, however, is in general tone. The Lenore of Bürger is, notwithstanding its startling and grisly theme, noticeably simple in treatment: Rossetti has largely reinforced it on the picturesque or romantic side. It may perhaps have been by mere inadvertence that he turns the religious atmosphere of the poem, which is manifestly Protestant, into Roman Catholic: thus, for instance, a "Vaterunser" becomes an "Ave Marie." But, if this was inadvertence, it testifies all the more strongly to the romantic impulse in his mind. In stanza 15 the translator is wrong in indicating that midnight is already past, for the clock afterwards strikes eleven; and in stanza 17 the ghostly bridegroom, in saying "zur Wette," only means "I wager you," and not "'Tis for a wager I bear thee away."

Without dwelling further upon details, I will quote here ​stanza 27 of the German ballad, which the reader can compare with the translated stanza:—

So far as I am aware, the first English rendering of Lenore appeared in the Monthly Magazine, done by William Taylor of Norwich, and entitled Ellenore. It takes the literary form of a modern-antique, and throws the period of the ballad back from the Seven Years' War to crusading times. Next, Sir Walter Scott, in 1796, published a version anonymously. He borrowed from his predecessor (not from Bürger) the well-known lines—

(only substituting the word "along" for "across"). Considering that, according to Scott's and Taylor's translations, ​the lovers are riding to Hungary, the second of these lines is just as reasonable as Shakespear's "Bohemia near the Sea"; for where does the sea come in any ride to Hungary? Scott's William and Helen, as he entitled it, can hardly be called a translation: it is a paraphrase, put into the ordinary English ballad-metre, and altering the period of the story in the same way that Taylor had done. Several passages here and there are however translated closely enough. This rendering by Scott—not any other rendering of the ballad—must have been highly familiar to Dante Rossetti several years before he undertook his own version. In 1796 a translation, Leonora, was published by W. R. Spencer, with engravings by Lady Diana Beauclerc. It is, I think, barely less faithful than Rossetti's version; the difference being that, while the latter exceeds in picturesque colouring, Spencer loads up the then accepted pomposities of "poetic diction." The metre is more distant than Rossetti's from the original; the rhyming being always alternate, and the lines always of four feet. On the whole it is a creditable performance. There are also translations by Pye, ​the Poet Laureate, and by J. T. Stanley, nearly contemporaneous with Spencer's. The Laureate was not extremely faithful to his original in substance, and not at all in metre; and I think his version hardly as good as the average of others. Stanley might pass muster tolerably enough, were it not that he has stupidly added to the ballad a long tag of his own, turning the whole affair into a dream. The famous designer Retzsch made a series of outlines to Lenore, published at Leipsic in 1840, with the text in German, and likewise in an English rendering by F. Shoberl. Of all the translations that I have seen, this is the faithfullest. The metre is correctly followed, and the diction comes as close as one could demand. Many lines however are very poor, from a poetic or literary point of view. What could be more miserable than

instead of

As will be seen, all the translations of which I have as yet spoken were produced before that of Dante Rossetti. The following two are of later date. In 1847 Mrs. Julia ​Margaret Cameron (the same lady, a valued friend of mine, who afterwards produced a considerable impression by her splendid pictorial-looking photographs) published an ornamental volume—her own rendering of Lenore, accompanied by steel-engravings after Maclise. Between the translation and the designs there is an odd discrepancy; for the former is correct to the date indicated by Bürger, whereas the latter are mediæval. Mrs. Cameron, in her preface, seems to suppose that her rendering is a strictly faithful one, but I can only say that she was mistaken: she does not stick close to the terms of her original, and she wholly discards its metre. In 1855 there was a translation by John Oxenford, a good German scholar: it is however rather an adaptation than a translation, being done to serve as the words for a cantata by G. A. Macfarren produced at a Birmingham Festival. There are yet other versions of Lenore, known to me little or not at all: the reader may perhaps opine that I have already mentioned quite enough.

Of all the translations with which I am acquainted, the best, I venture to think, is the one which Dante Rossetti wrote at the age of sixteen. I say it without hesitation, ​but with a full consciousness that the critical opinion expressed by a brother carries very little weight. Some of the other renderings—as Taylor's, Scott's, and Stanley's—are put out of count by arbitrary alterations: the remaining ones are less animated, less poetical, and mostly less faithful, than Rossetti's. It may be as well to state here that, as the Lenore was the first translation of any importance that he produced, so also was it the first favourable example of his powers as a verse-writer. His original ballad-poem of Sir Hugh the Heron, written mostly at the age of twelve, was not indeed worse than one would expect from so boyish a hand, but no human being who knows the meaning of the word "good" can apply that epithet to Sir Hugh the Heron; and another shorter ballad, William and Marie, which he composed at the age of about fourteen, is even inferior to its precursor. This William and Marie, as it happens, was sold at the same auction-sale in which Lenore was included: it fetched a price decidedly more than proportionate to its poetic deservings.

In 1844, when Rossetti translated Lenore, this poetic invention was known to English readers as well as almost ​any other foreign poem that could be named: I presume that it is a good deal less familiar to the present generation. I will therefore say a few words about the ballad and its author. Gottfried August Bürger, a very ill-starred specimen of the poetic race, was born on January 1st, 1748, son of a Lutheran minister, at Molmerswende in Halberstadt. He was fond of romantic solitude, and was anything but a strict moralist. His face is not an interesting one: fleshy, with round eyes, and, save the mouth, large features. A professorship at Göttingen, without fixed salary, formed his principal dependence. Lenore, published towards 1775, was the first poem of his to fix attention, which it effectually did; there was also the equally celebrated Wild Huntsman. Unlucky in most things, Bürger was specially unlucky in his marriages, three in number. Shortly after publishing Lenore, he married a Hanoverian lady named Leonhart, and then by his misdoing consigned her, as his spectral Wilhelm did Lenore, to an early grave. As soon as he was married to one Leonhart, he fell desperately in love with another, the younger sister whom he has celebrated under the name of Molly. ​The wife, worn out with troubles and mortifications, died in 1784. Bürger forthwith espoused his Molly; but she also soon died, in 1786, in childbed. (This is rather a curious parallel to the case of the thrice-wedded poet of England, Milton, whose second wife also expired in childbed.) Bürger was still willing to try his chance in the matrimonial lottery. Before his choice had been fixed he received a letter from Stuttgart, written by a young lady in cultivated and feeling language. She professed enthusiasm for his poetry, and willingness to bestow her hand upon him. The poet, after making some inquiry, was only too eager to assent, and he brought home his third bride. But the result was a woful failure. The lady became faithless to her husband, made his life a torment, and, in less than three years, had to be divorced. Bürger did not survive this break-up for long. He was very poor, he was harassed by a bitter critique written by Schiller, and everything seemed to go wrong with him. In June 1794 he died, aged only forty-six.