Christoph Martin Wieland was not only an extraordinarily productive writer, poet, editor and publisher of the German Enlightenment but also an almost equally prolific translator. In addition to his pioneering translations of Shakespeare, he translated many ancient Greek and Latin texts into German: Horace's Epistles and Satires (1782 and 1786 respectively), the entire works of Lucian (1788–89), Aristophanes’ Acharnians (1794), Knights (1797), Clouds (1798), Birds (1806), parts of the Memorabilia and the Symposium of Xenophon (1799–1802) as well as Euripides’ Ion (1803) and Helen (1805). He died before completing an ambitious German edition of all of Cicero's letters in 1813. While Wieland's Horace and his Lucian have received ample attention over the years, the remainder of his translations are not well known beyond specialist circles, and Wieland's contribution to the history and theory of translation has on the whole been neglected. R.'s study, a ‘leicht überarbeitete Fassung’ of her dissertation, aims to reclaim the importance of translation in Wieland's oeuvre.

A strength of R.'s book is the choice of her sample: the ‘Sokratische Übersetzungen’, i.e. Aristophanes’ Clouds and Xenophon's Memorabilia and Symposium, all published within a few years at the turn of the century. While these ‘Socratic Translations’ were never explicitly grouped together (the heading is hers, not Wieland's), R. shows that they are all intimately connected to Wieland's deep fascination – a ‘lebenslange intellektuelle Affaire’, as Jan Philipp Reemtsma put it (quoted by R. on p. 13 n. 36) – with Socrates. As she points out, it was in the late 1790s that Wieland became particularly interested in the vexed question of the ‘historical Socrates’; his translations, not least those of the works of Xenophon (who was, in the eighteenth century, generally thought to offer a more realistic and faithful portrait of Socrates than Plato did), were the cornerstone of his attempt to come close to the historical Socrates. Together, they arguably prepare the ground for Wieland's chef-d’œuvre, the epistolary novel Aristipp und einige seiner Zeitgenossen (1800–01), in which Socrates, as Aristippos’ teacher, plays a major role, and which re-purposes material from some of Wieland's ‘Socratic Translations’. As R. argues, it is characteristic for the polymath Wieland's intellectual modus operandi that it is a novelistic rather than a scholarly work that marks the culmination of his engagement with Socrates. Wieland wrote a number of philological studies and furnished his translations with an extremely rich apparatus of introductory essays and notes, but he was never interested solely in scholarly dissection and analysis; rather, he sought to breathe new life into the artefacts of the past. His primary aim was that of mediating antiquity in such a clear and transparent fashion that his audience would, paradoxically, gain immediate access to it. Wieland's philological work ‘drängt dabei von sich aus zum Erzählerischen’ (p. 316) and finds a natural continuation in the Aristipp.

The methodological rigour of the nascent academic discipline of Klassische Philologie, emblematised in F.A. Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795), was alien to Wieland. R., however, convincingly does away with the old view that Wieland had somehow failed to keep up with scholarly progress. He was in fact very well aware of developments in philological Fachwissenschaft, but, ultimately, his interests lay elsewhere. Similarly, R. rejects the view, entrenched ever since Goethe established a historical teleology of translation modes in Noten und Abhandlungen zu besserem Verständniß des West-östlichen Divans (1819), that Wieland adhered to an outdated mode of Enlightenment translation over-confident in its appropriation of foreign texts. Wieland, she argues, may never have published a fully-fledged theory of translation, but he followed, and indeed vocally contributed to, the debates on translation and translatability that gained momentum among German intellectuals with the publication of Johann Heinrich Voß's translations of Homer from 1779 onwards. It is a welcome achievement of R.'s monograph that Wieland's reflections on the subject, which are scattered across his oeuvre in countless prefaces to his own translations, in letters, essays and reviews, are now meticulously collected and documented, with a Textsammlung in the volume's appendix providing a selection of relevant excerpts (pp. 355–74). R.'s analysis of this material offers ample evidence of the high degree of reflection and nuance that Wieland brought to bear on his translations. Wieland's achievement was indeed acknowledged by Goethe in his speech Zu brüderlichem Andenken Wielands (1813), which includes the locus classicus for the distinction between what we may call source-language vs target-language (or domesticating vs foreignising etc.) modes of translation: ‘There are two principles of translation (Übersetzungsmaximen): one requires that the author of a foreign nation be brought over to us, in such a way that we may perceive him as our own; the other, conversely, demands from us that we go across to the foreign author and attune ourselves to his circumstances, his manner of speaking, and his characteristics’. Significantly, Goethe here acknowledges Wieland as a mediator between these extremes: ‘Our friend, who, here as elsewhere, sought the middle way, aimed to combine the two; being a man of sentiment and good taste, however, he would, in cases of doubt, follow the first principle’ (quoted by R. on p. 93; translations from the German here and in the following: R.L.). R.'s painstakingly detailed analysis of Wieland's ‘Socratic Translations’ confirms the versatility and subtlety of a translator whose ‘ultimate purpose’ was always ‘to deprive [his] readers of nothing, or at least as little as possible, of the sense (Sinn) and ethos (Geist) of a passage’ (in Wieland's note ‘An den Leser’ prefacing his translation of the Memorabilia published in 1799; quoted by R. on pp. 106–7).

The discussion of Wieland's Aristophanes and Xenophon takes up the bulk of R.'s book (Chapters 3.2 and 3), and argues closely from the texts, frequently offering lengthy comparisons of Wieland's text and the respective original passages. The chapter on Aristophanes, after an introductory analysis of the prologue of Clouds (Nub. 1–18), is organised by subject and offers sections on Wieland's approach to form and metre, wordplay, anachronisms, additions and expansions and, inevitably, obscenities. The chapter on Xenophon is less rigorously structured and focuses more on contextual matters such as the question of which sections of the Memorabilia Wieland included in his translation and which editions and translations he consulted. Nevertheless, this chapter, too, gives precedence to the discussion of examples over abstract theorising. This also holds true of the remainder of the book where R. offers an introduction that includes a section on Wieland and Socrates (1), an Entstehungsgeschichte of the ‘Socratic Translations’ (2), a discussion of Wieland's explicit comments on translation (3.1), a chapter on Wieland as Philologe (4) centring on his important essay on Clouds from 1799 and on the Aristipp's scholarly background. This is rounded off by a ‘Resümee’ (5), a systematic bibliography (6), an Appendix including a chronology of the ‘Socratic Translations’ and the Textsammlung (7) and an Index nominum.

R.'s dissertation is a welcome addition to a growing number of studies on Wieland and the Classics; her focus on a set of little-known texts that both deserve and reward attention is admirable. Moreover, R.'s strategy of close reading of extensively quoted passages allows readers to explore the texts on their own terms. To some degree, however, this has limited the scope and range of a study that occasionally lacks depth and does perhaps not always live up to the inherent interest of the material discussed. Wieland's concern with the historical Socrates and his acute awareness of the fact that Socrates is always already mediated and ventriloquised – in the above-mentioned preface ‘An den Leser’ Wieland notes that he does not doubt ‘that even Xenophon has often given us more the ethos (Geist) than the words of his master, and added, at times unwittingly, at others knowingly, something of his own’ (quoted by R. on p. 9) – make the ‘Socratic Translations’ an even more striking exercise in self-reflection and self-commentary than R. perhaps is prepared to acknowledge.