Mark Twain's Work in German Translations

Introduction: Mark Twain's Work in German Translations

There is a long-standing tradition of describing Mark Twain as a particularly "American" author. Summarizing what many contemporaries felt, Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain's official biographer, described him as "the man most characteristically American in every thought and word and action of his life" (Vol.I 12). So much of his life and his career seemed to have encapsulated defining features of American culture that it appeared only natural to regard him as the best representative of a nation that had a hard time defining what it deemed to be characteristic for itself. In his writings, he presented to his readers unique American landscapes and experiences, such as life in the American West and, especially, along the Mississippi River. He also revealed himself as a master of the American language, attempting to capture the nuances of everyday speech and directing attention to its varieties in his experiments with forms of linguistic expressions that departed from the conventions of what constituted the accepted standard. Perhaps most importantly, the name "Mark Twain" became synonymous with a feature that the nation, by the end of the 19th century, came to identify as a distinctive characteristic: American humor.

Despite the fact that Mark Twain was seen as a figure firmly rooted in American soil, his work proved to be attractive to readers all over the world. From the days when he first emerged as a writer, his writing was deemed entertaining and interesting enough to be translated into foreign languages. In 1905, Der Deutsche Correspondent, a German-language daily newspaper published in Baltimore, reported that newspapers in Germany used the occasion of Mark Twain's 70th birthday to praise him for his excellent writings, which they said have been widely distributed in the country for many years, both in translation and in their original form ("Amerikanischer Humorist geehrt," Dec 2, 1905).

According to the work of Robert Rodney, translations into German occupied a special position. Rodney reported that during the period from 1867 to 1976, there were more than 600 German editions of Twain's works in German (xxiv). He singled out the high popularity of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, with at least 174 German-language editions, and 100 editions of his stories and sketches (xxiv).

Perhaps the reference to the short writings needs to be clarified in so far as they were usually not complete translations of the collections that Mark Twain had put out himself, but selections from them that had been assembled by individual editors according to their own tastes.

According to Rodney's research, the first German translation of a Mark Twain book was published in 1874, seven years after the original had appeared in the US and Great Britain. In view of its double-barreled title, Jim Smiley's berühmter Springfrosch und dergleichen wunderliche Käuze mehr — Im Silberlande, it is apparent that this book, with its 408 pages, represents only an incomplete translation of the material contained in the The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches (1867) and Roughing It (1872). As is also manifested in the translations which appeared in the six-volume series Mark Twain's ausgewählte Humoristische Schriften (first published by Robert Lutz, Stuttgart, 1890), publishers did not always respect the textual integrity of the original texts when they omitted sections of chapters which they  or their translators regarded as dispensable.

The core material contained in this online bibliography is drawn from four resources that have made substantial contributions to the project of compiling information on German-language translations of Mark Twain's writings. The largest number of entries comes from Robert Rodney's rich and indispensable reference resource, Mark Twain International.* His material is supplemented by the 140 items listed in the Mark Twain section of Aiga Klotz's 1999 bibliography which collects only books that qualify as children's or young adult literature [covering the years 1898-1964]. Hemminghaus's pioneering bibliographic work "German Translations of Mark Twain's Works, 1874-1939" (147-154) served to double-check the accuracy of the information printed in Rodney and Klotz. Rathjen's more recent list (28-33) of German translations of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (2019) was a first step to update the information from Rodney and Klotz beyond the respective endpoints of their research [1890-1997]. All titles listed in these sources have been entered into a database to check for consistency and to eliminate duplicates. Whenever necessary, the entries found in Rodney's book have been edited to restore their original German spelling.

Rodney called his work a "provisional bibliography" ([lxxi]) because he realized – as anyone embarking on a project of such scope must do – that it was impossible to track down and identify each and every edition that has appeared over such a long period of time. The same restrictions apply to this online bibliography. At the same time, it is hoped that the dynamic nature of this project will create opportunities for the inclusion of additional material as more resources become available for review and evaluation.

* It is worth noting that Rodney's bibliography does not include information about translators and illustrators. It is unclear whether he was working from bibliographic lists that omitted these details or if he decided that the significant effort required to obtain such information would not yield sufficiently relevant insights and would unnecessarily lengthen his book.

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