The biblical scholar and orientalist Paul de Lagarde (1827–91) once wrote of his mentor Friedrich Rückert, “it is inexplicable how he ever could have considered himself German for he was the most consequent cosmopolitan one could imagine.”Footnote ¹ The contradiction Lagarde perceived in the poet–philologist reflects an unusual career. If at all, Friedrich Rückert is known within two seemingly unrelated circles. As a lyric poet and liberal nationalist, Rückert enjoyed cult-like status among educated middle-class Germans in the late nineteenth century. His Biedermeier paeans to young love, the joys of family, and the beauties of the German countryside display a dizzying facility with language and end rhyme. Gustav Mahler, Franz Schubert, and Johannes Brahms set passages from his celebrated Liebesfrühling and the delicate Kindertodtenlieder to music. Rückert's legacy as an orientalist and a pioneering and gifted translator has fared slightly better.Footnote ² His poetic talents captured in German the difficult meters of Sanskrit, Farsi, and Arabic literature, while creatively replicating foreign forms and styles. Lagarde reported that Rückert could spontaneously translate previously unseen Farsi and Arabic poetry into beautiful German verse.Footnote ³

Orientalist translation was an important mode of cultural exchange in the nineteenth century, and recent scholars have explored the complex negotiation of global power and national self-definition that transpired in the pages of translated texts as they circulated across continents and empires. In the 1950s, British social anthropologists used the term “cultural translation” to refer to an interpretive ideal that successfully mediated cultural difference by establishing linguistic equivalences. Translation, in this view, enabled the ethnographer to relay unfamiliar social practices to uninitiated audiences.Footnote ⁴ Talal Asad and other critics rightly insist that the assumption of having achieved equivalence in translation masks vast networks of competing ideologies, power relations, and historical interests. The weaker languages of developing countries, Asad notes, are more likely “to submit to forcible transformation in the translation process.”Footnote ⁵

An effacement of power in the act of translation accompanied European imperial conquest. The illusion that languages were mutually compatible concealed how effectively translation has served as a strategy of containment and a technology of domination.Footnote ⁶ According to Bernard S. Cohn, for example, translation enabled the conquest of knowledge that helped secure British rule in India. A fiction of transparency permitted the British to reorder Indian forms of knowledge and transform local traditions and modes of thought. At the same time, translated texts availed colonizers of the knowledge necessary to impose order and classify groups in Indian society.Footnote ⁷ European translators similarly detached Native American terms from their proper cultural meanings; Indian ideas of place were twisted into European-style property relations, dispossessing Native Americans of land and an arsenal of alternative concepts.Footnote ⁸ Translation offered European imperialists a mechanism for “purifying” foreign cultures and speaking on their behalf.Footnote ⁹

Postcolonial critics, such as Homi Bhabha, have identified sites of resistance that emerge in the process of cultural translation. In the Location of Culture (1994), Bhabha argues that translation ruptures the ties between language and cultural space. New historical subjects, fragmented and decentered, take form in the disjuncture that arises when the local encounters the global. The act of cultural translation opens up a hybrid, in-between space for Bhabha; it dramatizes the untranslatability of culture and foregrounds resistance to forceful processes of transformation.Footnote ¹⁰ For this reason, he embraces the early nineteenth-century project of world literature, a genre whose very existence relied on translation. As conceived by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Bhabha asserts, world literature was an “emergent, prefigurative category” with the potential to articulate “cultural dissensus and alternity.” The terrain of world literature, in his view, need not be restricted to the transmission of intact national canons; rather it can accommodate the transnational histories of migrants, refugees, and borderlands.Footnote ¹¹ While acknowledging the transformative effect of orientalist translation, this essay suggests that the local demands of the world translator set limits on the introduction of newness into a language. Rückert bowed to a host of national and cultural imperatives that steered his hybrid texts in particular directions.

The lack of a centralized state and a German empire before 1871 raises the question what constituency, kinds of knowledge, or process of self-definition stood to gain from German translation. The frequent claim German concepts of the nation made to universality rendered translation particularly attractive to liberal nationalists such as Rückert. A tension between provincialism and cosmopolitanism characterized many German authors in the late eighteenth century.Footnote ¹² Even into the early twentieth century, Friedrich Meinecke considered universalism to be a particularly German predicament. In Cosmopolitanism and the National State (1908), he argued that an influx of universalism enabled the German idea of the nation to transcend local principalities in the early nineteenth century; German nationalists then had to vanquish cosmopolitanism in order for nationalism to be useful to the state under Otto von Bismarck.Footnote ¹³ Translation offered nineteenth-century nationalists a mechanism for mediating between the local and the global. Yet German orientalism was never simply about Germany. The self-proclaimed German affinity for translation bestowed on the nation a unique cultural status within Europe. The cultural hierarchies and civilizational orders that emerged as German intellectuals placed world cultures in relation to each other likewise had global implications.

Translation was Rückert's preferred mechanism for elevating German national culture to universal significance. A tradition of reconciling the universalizing claims of Christianity with love for the nation provided a model for imagining Germany's place in world culture, especially among Protestant Germans. In Rückert's view, Germans were a people chosen by God to transform their mother tongue into a new version of the language spoken in paradise and thus to open a new chapter in the history of salvation. The German language could transcend Babel, he believed, by systematically incorporating foreign texts into the national literary canon. For Rückert, German cultural dominance in post-Napoleonic Europe depended on a controlled form of what one might term globalization. He created hybrid texts that brought Middle Eastern and South Asian literature into the parlors of the German cultural elite, while silencing or Germanizing passages that threatened to unsettle middle-class readers. Articulations of female desire, for example, required Rückert to tread an especially fine line between bourgeois notions of domesticity and his love for the foreign. Studies of orientalist translation often seek to identify prejudicial structures or distortions that shaped the production of knowledge on a particular area of the world.Footnote ¹⁴ This essay investigates the type of cultural authority Rückert claimed as an orientalist translator in early nineteenth-century Germany and the strategies he employed to position the German critic advantageously in relation to foreign authors and texts.

Rückert's “favorite student,”Footnote ¹⁵ Paul Lagarde, shared the poet's vision of how philological exegesis of ancient oriental texts could bestow a unique spiritual mission on Germany. During the winter semester of 1844–5, Rückert taught the seventeen-year-old Lagarde Farsi in his small Berlin apartment. He exerted the “decisive influence”Footnote ¹⁶ on the young Lagarde's decision to interpret Scripture, especially the Septuagint, based on knowledge of Arabic, Coptic, and Syriac. Remaining close friends and colleagues, the pair shared an interest in how God interacted with particular human communities. Yet the relative importance each placed on cosmopolitanism within the national idea varied. Rückert imagined the German nation emerging as the universal bearer of Christian truth. Lagarde, by contrast, envisioned a national form of Christianity purged of its Semitic elements.Footnote ¹⁷ Like Rückert, however, he assumed that nations were the vessels through which God revealed himself and that German critics could transcend the limitations of their particular historical position and grasp the divine in its totality.Footnote ¹⁸

I. LANGUAGE, RELIGION, AND “GERMAN” UNIVERSALITY

An esoteric, Protestant understanding of language shaped Rückert's ambitions as an orientalist translator. His programmatic Philological–Philosophical Dissertation on the Idea of Philology (1811) envisioned German attaining the status of an “ideal” or “universal language”Footnote ¹⁹ which both expressed the character of the nation and promised union with the divine. Napoleon's defeat of Prussia in 1806 had renewed among German Protestants the problem of how to reconcile nationalism with Christian universality. For Christian patriots, such as Friedrich Carl Moser, the German Volk had been a divine community whose preservation was an ethical requirement for Christians.Footnote ²⁰ The legacy of the Reformation suggested to theologians such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) that the very forms of religion were nationally specific. God had entrusted Martin Luther with proclaiming the eternal truths contained in the Bible; the allied victory over Napoleon at Leipzig proved God stood with Germans against the French. Footnote ²¹ The belief that Germans were the chosen people of a new covenant with God held particular appeal for Pietists within the evangelical wing of German Protestantism. Their nationalization of Old Testament themes bestowed upon Germans the expectation of bearing a universal mission.Footnote ²²

Among German Christian mystics, language provided a powerful metaphor for how the nation received and engaged divine revelation. Since the sixteenth century, mystical thinkers had argued that national languages synthesized in dynamic fashion national feeling and the universal truths of Christianity. Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), for example, proposed in opposition to a rationalist appreciation of language that human tongues had been formed in the image of God's word. The same living force through which God created earth and the heavens inspired the profane tongues of humankind. At the same time, Böhme asserted that national tongues reflected the character of the community that spoke them.Footnote ²³

Authors influenced by Pietism in the late eighteenth century embraced a similar understanding of language as God's living word conditioned by historical circumstance to oppose rational biblical criticism. Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder, for example, both assailed the theologian Johann David Michaelis (1717–91) for assuming language to be a perfectible instrument under man's rational control. These friends in Königberg reconceived the relationship between language, nationality, and divine truth in response to his Dissertation on the Influence of Opinions on Language, and of Language on Opinions (1759).Footnote ²⁴ In their view, Michaelis erred in assuming that the truths of divine revelation could be purged from the historical and social context in which scripture was written; the nationally specific aspects of biblical tongues did not merely obscure universal principles of the faith. Fallen tongues ensured that God's word directly inspired historical communities.

Hamann and Herder shaped the concept of language Rückert encountered as a university student. Reacting against the perceived dominance of French culture under Frederick the Great, these two authors ascribed to the German language the power to unify political communities and to shape the collective thought patterns of speakers. Hamann, for example, declared language to be the “mother of reason and revelation.”Footnote ²⁵ In his view, God had brought to life the world and its creatures through an act of speech. Historical tongues retained a living spark from this creative force so that all thought was “impregnated” by the “seed of the divine word.”Footnote ²⁶ Hamann learned Arabic, Hebrew, Chaldean, and Aramaic in an effort to reanimate the mystical power of the divine spirit found in ancient, Eastern texts. Language was likewise an artifact embodying and partly determining the history of the nation that spoke it. National tongues, for Hamann, offered the philologist “a sea of observations” on “the history of particular peoples, societies, sects, and individuals.”Footnote ²⁷ This claim, as Herder affirmed in Über die neuere deutsche Literatur (1767–8) enabled philologists to place language studies at the core of research into the formation of cultures and communities.Footnote ²⁸

Born the son of a Protestant magistrate in Lower Franconia, Bavaria, Rückert displayed an early talent for languages, learning Greek and Latin from his pastor. After finishing the gymnasium in Schweinfurt, he entered the University of Würzburg in 1805 intending to pursue a law degree. The young student abandoned his father's career track to study classical philology and mythology with the philosopher Johann Jakob Wagner (1775–1841). Himself a student of F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854), Wagner introduced Rückert to a speculative form of philology currently in vogue with the Jena Romantics. In his lectures on the philosophy of art, held in 1802–3, Schelling argued that historical tongues originated in the “absolute idea of language” which was of divine origin. The “speaking word of God, the logos,” represented, in his view, the “eternal and absolute act of self-affirmation . . . the divine act of creation.”Footnote ²⁹ Inner necessity drove the idea of language to seek fulfillment in material form. Historical tongues had thus degenerated from a state of perfection, but retained a spontaneous, creative vitality just like any self-determining idealist subject.Footnote ³⁰

In 1808–9, Rückert attended Freidrich Creuzer's controversial lectures in Heidelberg deriving classical Greek symbols and myths from Egyptian origins, an inspiration for his own orientalism.Footnote ³¹ Creuzer likely confronted the young Rückert with a tradition of Neoplatonist or Hermetic thought that for centuries had sought to reconcile Christianity with ancient Asian religious and philosophical ideas.Footnote ³² In his Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen (1810–12), the classical philologist proposed that Egyptian hieroglyphics constituted mystical symbols which embodied a primordial form of religious experience. Creuzer suspected that ancient Indian priests held secret religious knowledge, but that this wisdom had first taken symbolic form in hieroglyphics. Work on the Eleusian mysteries convinced him that the Greeks had adopted from Egypt certain universal symbols of knowledge, in particular religious pictograms.Footnote ³³ Rückert concurred that the ancient Hellenes had “learned from others,” having “taken away for themselves a certain portion of the Orient's endless treasures” and reworked them in their own image.Footnote ³⁴ He petitioned the Grand Duke of Würzburg to finance an apprenticeship to Creuzer's friend, the Austrian orientalist Joseph von Hammer. Rückert was rejected as too old for the post, but kept the fellow Freemason and arabist in his sights.Footnote ³⁵ According to his son Heinrich, however, Rückert remained “free of all the fantastical confusion in which Creuzer and his followers lost themselves.”Footnote ³⁶ Liberal Protestants tended to reject Creuzer as politically dangerous and gravitating too sharply towards conservative Christian mysticism.Footnote ³⁷

Romantic Neoplatonism shaped Rückert's religious sensibilities, especially his search for an elusive language of paradise. His short epic “Bau der Welt” (1812), for example, depicts primordial pagan cults presaging Protestant Christianity. The text traces the afterlife of an original divine revelation as it meanders through major historical cultures, including those of Egypt, India, the ancient Germanic tribes, and Greece, before the divine word takes true form among Hebrews and Christians. Rückert argued that each nation “cultivated” a nugget of the lost “art and wisdom” present in paradise. Although “submersed in a night of their own creation,” Egyptian priests, for example, possessed the “power of secret knowledge”; according to Rückert, “a beam of light still penetrated the darkness.” In 1819, Rückert learned Coptic, the language of early Christians, grammatically akin to Late Egyptian, which was written in hieroglyphics. The same divine ray had pierced Indic temples and the runic culture of northern Europe.Footnote ³⁸ As Rückert wrote to Lagarde in 1860, the “highest goal of our oriental philology” is to prove that the “pure (theistic) kernel of Christianity” was already present in the Upanishads.”Footnote ³⁹ Even after indology repudiated its romantic roots in favor of a more disciplined, historically exacting, philology, Rückert remained a mystical enthusiast.

The events of the Napoleonic occupation bound Rückert's language study to the politics of liberal nationalism. During Austria's brief war against Napoleon in 1809 Rückert rushed to the aid of Archduke Charles but only managed to reach Dresden by the time Vienna surrendered.Footnote ⁴⁰ His reputation as a poet of the Wars of Liberation stems from a collection of thirty Geharnischte Sonette (1814). “Only one sole bond has endured,” Rückert cautioned his defeated countrymen, “The language you otherwise scorn / Now you must love her as your last.”Footnote ⁴¹ Like J. G. Fichte, Rückert believed that language united the German people despite a lack of shared political institutions. The Congress of Vienna silenced any lingering expectation that a German national state might emerge in 1815; “Miss Germanity,” he lamented, lost both her crown and her virtue dancing to French reels.Footnote ⁴² Rückert briefly studied Old German lyrics and literature after 1815 hoping that resurrecting a glorious past would usher in “a new springtime” for Germany.Footnote ⁴³ His political poetry figuratively awakened the slumbering Emperor Barbarossa to restore the magnificence of the medieval German Reich.Footnote ⁴⁴

In the early years of the Restoration, Rückert's romantic nationalism drew accusations of political demagoguery. He demonstratively wore patriotic “old German” dress: a long back overcoat with white collar and long hair parted down the middle. In 1816 the Württemberg minister of police cautioned Rückert's publisher that the poet must either leave the state or drop all expressions of political opposition. Karl-August Wangenheim, the future minister of culture under King Wilhelm I, successfully intervened on Rückert's behalf.Footnote ⁴⁵ Rückert subsequently gravitated more towards liberal nationalism. Württemberg had dissolved its old constitution in 1806 after acquiring new territory under Napoleon. During controversies over designing a new constitution, Rückert supported Wangenheim's vision of liberal reform and publically confronted the popular Swabian poet Ludwig Uhland in 1816 and 1817. Rückert favored the crown's vision of constitutional monarchy against Uhland's defense of the old constitution and the traditional rights of the estates.

Politically, Rückert embraced a benevolent vision of constitutional monarchy. As Edgar Groß notes, he drew a “mirror for princes” depicting love as the binding force uniting a monarch and his people in his didactic poem Weisheit des Brahmanen (1836).Footnote ⁴⁶ When revolution erupted in 1848, Rückert disavowed both the radical opposition and the reactionary Prussian response. On linguistic grounds he favored a grossdeutch solution to German unification, but under Prussian, not Hapsburg, leadership. In Alsace, Switzerland, Austria, and Denmark, he argued, “you have written and sung in German tongues”; “here, not there, is your language.”Footnote ⁴⁷ For this reason, Rückert again wielded his pen in defense of the fatherland during the war over Schleswig-Holstein in 1863.

The speculative view of language Rückert cultivated and his enthusiasm for the East led the classicist Franz Passow to declare his dissertation “the product of a fool.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Written in elegant Latin, but barely passing its defense at the University of Jena, Rückert's dissertation proclaimed philology's lofty goal to be “knowledge of humanity through the word.” This required reconstructing what he variously termed “the totality of language,” “the idea of language itself,” or “absolute language.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The philologist's task was to scrutinize the various national tongues for evidence of what each embodied of the “original idea of humanity.” Religion, in Rückert's view, was the “true center” of national life. Each nation thus “expressed in language all manifestations of its life,” especially its “relationship to the divine.” For Rückert, religious differences could be traced back to the original languages spoken by the first communities of the faithful. He recommended interpreting the “myths and dogmas of individual peoples”Footnote ⁵⁰ based on linguistic forms, a project later undertaken by the comparative mythologist Friedrich Max Müller, whose father Rückert saved from drowning in Italy. Max Müller attended the same Farsi colloquium as Lagarde before departing for London to study the Rig Veda. The indologist later argued, as did Ernest Renan, that the affinity for monotheism resulted from primordial grammatical forms, famously attributing the errors of mythology to the “disease of language.”

The German language represented, for Rückert, the most viable medium for re-creating the primordial unity of poetry and philosophy in ideal form. At the end of history, one Volk would appear, in his view, that united the scattered parts of the original divine idea in a new “world harmony.” Germans were “a universal people” and their mother tongue was “equally universal” because “it incorporated its own idea and all the other ideas of the remaining languages.” Rückert concluded, moreover, that translation was the best method for reassembling “the fragments of foreign languages” in German, and thus rebuilding Babel. German's recent “desultory roaming about in imitation of foreign languages,” especially French, spoke to its receptivity. To become an ideal language, Rückert theorized, his mother tongue had to “weave into one wreath” the masterpieces of “poetry from all epochs and peoples.”Footnote ⁵¹

This ambition sealed Rückert's defection from classical philology to oriental studies. The “ideal life,” he concluded, could only be found “overflowing in the springs of the Orient.” Germany should cease being the “eternal schoolgirl of Greece,” in his view, and return to the location Friedrich Schlegel had three years earlier identified as both the primordial German homeland and the cradle of humanity and revelation. The “German genius,” Rückert recalled, had “already blazed a path to the highest font of humanity, to the Ganges, the sacred river of the Indians where it increasingly recognizes its own language flowing in the purest of currents.”Footnote ⁵² The close ties he then suspected between German, Farsi, and Sanskrit implied that German speakers had a particular talent for restoring the lost traces of an original revelation found in the East. According to Schlegel, German shared with Sanskrit similarly “organic” patterns of verb inflection distinct from the “mechanical” language of Hebrew or Arabic.Footnote ⁵³Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808) had had an immediate impact on Schelling and other Jena Romantics who may have shifted Rückert's sights to India. Rückert likewise assumed, as did Fichte, that contemporary German preserved exceptionally strong ties to its primordial origins while experiencing a period of rebirth that would reunite poetry and philosophy.Footnote ⁵⁴

After a year of teaching, Rückert surrendered a lectureship in classical philology to write poetry, while serving as an editor to Johann Friedrich Cotta's Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände. The opportunity to study non-European languages came in Vienna in 1818 on a return trip from Italy. For four months Rückert studied Farsi, and some Arabic and Turkish, with Joseph von Hammer, while residing with Schlegel, then imperial court secretary to Archduke Charles. The Swedish poet Per Daniel Atterbom, a follower of Schelling whom Rückert met in Rome, arranged their meeting. The unexpected death of a brother brought Rückert home to Schweinfurt. Having borrowed books from Hammer, however, he dedicated the next months to learning Farsi, hand-copying Ferdowsi's Epic of Kings. Rückert's first translations appeared shortly thereafter: in 1819 an edition of Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi's ghazals, a poetic form often dedicated to the theme of love and separation consisting of five or more rhyming couplets and a refrain; and in 1821 the Östliche Rosen, adapted from the ghazals of the mystic poet Hafiz. In 1827, Rückert caught Sanskrit fever, learning the language well enough to read “Nal and Damayanti” from the Mahabharata within three months.Footnote ⁵⁵ According to his son, Rückert only needed a six- to eight-week period of immersion to become versed in a new language.Footnote ⁵⁶ He mastered an astounding forty-four distinct tongues in his lifetime.Footnote ⁵⁷

Lack of theological training made an academic appointment difficult for Rückert. Marriage to Luise Wiethaus-Fischer in 1821 and the birth of the first of their ten children compelled him to solicit Hammer's assistance. Bavarian King Ludwig I overcame the University of Erlangen's initial reluctance “to give salaries to aesthetes and linguistic dilettantes (luxuries, as it were) along with useful professors.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In 1826, Rückert replaced the hebraicist Arnold Kanne in the theological faculty, promising to teach Hebrew, Chaldean, and Syriac, as well as biblical exegesis. His courses included interpretation of the psalms, Arabic, and Farsi. Work on Scripture and biblical texts however, never captured Rückert's imagination in the same way as pagan monuments to a universal divine spirit of love.

II. WORLD POETRY AS A GERMAN CULTURAL IDEAL

The move to Erlangen coincided for Rückert with greater sensitivity to the emerging discipline of comparative-historical philology. After 1825, for example, Hammer's inattention to grammar, word choice, and meter increasingly perturbed the poet.Footnote ⁵⁹ Comparative philology's claims to historical precision and greater scientific certitude did little, however, to discourage Rückert's youthful fantasies. Instead, the promise of exactitude seemed to bring closer his romantic dream of transcending Babel. Rückert declared in his dissertation that the ideal language “has not yet been created; it must be created.”Footnote ⁶⁰ In the decade and half of his Erlangen period Rückert probed the efficacy with which translation and philologically inspired poetry could produce his desired world harmony. The parties of religious orthodoxy and radical Pietism ultimately left Rückert disaffected in Erlangen,Footnote ⁶¹ and in 1841 he moved to the theologically more tolerant atmosphere of Berlin.Footnote ⁶²

Weltpoesie, or “world poetry,” was the cultural ideal that Rückert expected to emerge as various national literatures interacted in German translation. His reflections on the topic often reference the local circumstances from which German readers encountered the foreign, as in the poem “Weltpoesie” (1833) published among some “New Songs” otherwise devoted to the “little village where I live.” Rückert explained that he had “learned to decipher” the “sacred handwriting” found on a drifting palm leaf. “Rustlings millennia old / In the crowns of Indian palms,” he mused, “Now overheard by you / Under roofs thatched with northern straw.” The villagers who “loudly rule the marketplace” would not notice his efforts, but Rückert expected a “quiet reward.” Educated Germans would learn to transcend the cultural limitations of their particular location and forge global understanding. “That humanity understands itself / Beyond the limits of its cultivation,” he wrote, “This every primeval tone serves, / Which, in Germanizing, I tame [bänd'ge].”Footnote ⁶³ Rückert concluded the opening to his adaptation of the Schi King (1833) in a similar spirit: “World poetry / Alone is world reconciliation.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Taming a foreign language allowed the philologist to unlock “once unfamiliar ways of experiencing the world,” according to Rückert. “With every new language you learn,” he explained in the Weisheit des Brahmanen; “you liberate a new soul inside yourself.” The architect of world poetry, he reckoned, was a master of all languages, uniting in his person “the souls of all humanity.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Language's perceived ability to shape thought encouraged Rückert to equate language learning with acquiring a new worldview. “Pure virgin, ever beautiful,” language was the “spiritual mother of her sons,” a constructive force that guided men as they built communities, solved riddles, and experienced the world.Footnote ⁶⁶ An active subject in her own right, language loomed large as a “mistress” over her students, and Rückert bemoaned her fickle ways.Footnote ⁶⁷

The related concept of Weltliteratur, introduced by Johann Wolfgang Goethe in 1827, likewise presupposed a dialectic that placed a subnational locality, perhaps a poet's town or province, in conversation with universal or transnational themes.Footnote ⁶⁸ Although Goethe reserved an “honorable role . . . for us Germans”Footnote ⁶⁹ in its creation, world literature was not a specifically German achievement, nor did it even imply an exchange of intact national canons. German literature itself had little internal consistency, Goethe believed, as an assemblage of “heterogeneous, if not conflicting, elements.”Footnote ⁷⁰ For Goethe, an emerging world market and “increasing communication”Footnote ⁷¹ among nations placed literary texts in a state of intensified interaction and exchange.Footnote ⁷² A plurality of multidirectional translations would encourage equitable dialogue among different languages and cultures.

Goethe's evasion of the national is often tied to the arguably “postcolonial” status of Germany in the Sattelzeit, although it is also a legacy of Weimar classicism. For John Pizer, the liminality of the German states within Europe, their political fragmentation, and a lack of intellectual cohesion made attractive the ideal of world literature. Germany's subnational status inspired a transnational literary modality as the only possible alternative to cultural fragmentation.Footnote ⁷³ According to Todd Kontje, late eighteenth-century Germans, such as Novalis, embraced cosmopolitanism to compensate for their relative provincialism. Isolated German intellectuals, imaging themselves as subjects of local lords, not participants in a national state, reached out from their regional environs to engage a broader European culture. German writers had no choice but to be cosmopolitan.Footnote ⁷⁴

A greater concern for the nation characterized the early Romantic project of progressive universal poetry, which Friedrich Schlegel announced in 1798.Footnote ⁷⁵ Faith in the ultimate unity of all spiritual beings evoked in the Romantics a desire to overcome the artistic and historical uniqueness of individual works. The act of translation supposedly brought a foreign text closer to the absolute idea towards which the original tended. Thus German translations could better articulate the true meaning of poetry just as Luther's translation of the Bible brought Protestants closer to the Christian truth of Scripture.Footnote ⁷⁶ This talent for translation called Germany to assume spiritual and literary leadership over other nations. Cosmopolitanism became a source of national distinction.Footnote ⁷⁷ Especially after the Napoleonic invasions, Fichte and other authors bound cosmopolitanism more tightly to German nationality, distancing the term from its associations with French culture. For Fichte, achievements in German scholarship and culture justified a form of cultural diffusion in which an increasingly homogeneous world adopted German standards and norms.Footnote ⁷⁸

Rückert's pairing of nationalism and cosmopolitanism ostensibly aimed to re-create the mutual understanding that existed among nations before God destroyed the Tower of Babel. In 1818, Rückert presented himself as the apprentice to a divine creator who had bestowed “one voice upon each life.”Footnote ⁷⁹ His mission was to resolve the incomprehensibility of world languages. “Resurrect from rubble creation's past,” he entreated, “Solve the confusion of languages that caused construction to falter; / Raise for us the idea of the master's plan, build well!”Footnote ⁸⁰ Perhaps for this reason, the rigorous comparativist August Friedrich Pott still found it necessary to dispel biblical accounts of the origin of linguistic difference in 1863.Footnote ⁸¹ For Rückert, knowledge of historical tongues merely brought the language of Adam and Eve closer to modern Germans. In his “Encouragement to Translate the Hamasa” (1831), Rückert argued that “Poetry in all her Tongues / Is for the ordained one language alone, / The language that rang out in paradise.”Footnote ⁸² When at last the scattered fragments of humanity were rejoined “in the heart of Europe,” he predicted, “A new paradise will be reclaimed.”Footnote ⁸³

The divine character of the Weltgespräch that Rückert imagined rested on its inclusivity and universality. Yet despite its apparent disinterest, the cosmopolitanism of which Lagarde accused Rückert was necessarily located and embodied within the German states of the 1830s.Footnote ⁸⁴ In the Vormärz, liberal nationalists revived the rhetoric of cosmopolitanism as a way to show their affinity for the fight against absolutism elsewhere Europe, for example in Greece.Footnote ⁸⁵ Rückert's cosmopolitanism was likewise rooted in a liberal nationalist agenda, as well as in the cultural and class ambitions of the educated German bourgeoisie. As Lawrence Venuti has argued, the nineteenth-century encounter with the foreign also helped fashion an “ideal cultural self.”Footnote ⁸⁶

World poetry was a specifically German national achievement, for Rückert. “It is my great people,” he wrote in 1831,

Works from other nations were to assemble in a distinctly “German pantheon.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Critics initially questioned the nationalist credentials of Rückert's translations. Willibald Alexis, a historical novelist, reported concern that “Rückert, the German poet, was going to ruin as an Oriental philologist.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Jacob Grimm dismissed his “ghazal mischief” (Gasellenunwesen).Footnote ⁸⁹ For another reviewer, “the new tone” of Rückert's Östliche Rosen was not “the correct and true one . . . from which German poetry should expect prosperity and progress.”Footnote ⁹⁰ By the early 1830s, the collapse of Romantic indology and the outrage that followed the Creuzer affair made for less-receptive audiences. Yet language never ceased to be a defining national characteristic for Rückert. His adaptations of foreign verse aimed to beautify the mother tongue and thereby strengthen German national culture. “Multiplying the treasures of the German language,” Rückert explained, “Since youth has been my endeavor / . . . a new rhyme, a new phrase / Appears to me an expansion of this treasure.”Footnote ⁹¹

As the host of world poetry, Germany would emerge as the cultural center of the world, Rückert believed, no longer subservient to French or antique models. “I'd like to build a German city,” he declared,

The images Rückert publicized of German cultural dominance offered a remarkably literal alternative to glory earned through political power and sovereignty. “I am king of a quiet nation of dreams,” he wrote in 1823, “Sovereign in the heavenly realm of fantasies.” A poet commands the inhabitants of foreign lands to “Build a world palace with many rooms, / Where united the splendor of the world shines. / Build for me as many rooms as there are nations.” This realm was a “sanctuary” spared the “burden of tyranny” which liberal nationalists faced under the Restoration.Footnote ⁹³

At the same time, the desire to protect the integrity of the Heimat and the home set limits on how close the foreign could encroach on German readers. “Where does the homeland end and foreign land begin?” Rückert wondered in the Weisheit des Brahmanen.Footnote ⁹⁴ His dissertation had envisioned translated texts occupying select “areas” in the “spacious expanses of our language.” Within these confines, the natural tendency of the German language to expel the foreign would be repressed. Rückert wished to prevent foreign elements from crossing “their boundaries into neighboring territory” until they formed an organic bond with the mainstream language. The foreign, he feared, would remain forever “parched and dry” unless readers understood it as an original German creation.Footnote ⁹⁵

By the early 1830s, the young Rückert's confidence in Germans’ willingness to embrace Eastern models began to wane. Reference to the Heimat and the middle-class German household increasingly provided a point of stability or anchor in Rückert's work that mitigated the otherwise destabilizing effects of encountering foreign worlds. “[B]ring as much foreign ornament, / Home with you as suits your taste,” Rückert counseled, “so long as your domestic comfort tolerates it.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Rückert confessed in “Welt und ich” (1834) that although his “Wishes boldly turn / To improving the world,” he only really desired to cultivate his own garden.Footnote ⁹⁷ In “Wohnlichkeit” (1834), Rückert explained his ambition to experience other regions “as a wanderer,” but still “build my little cabin / In the green valley of the Heimat.”Footnote ⁹⁸ In this Rückert succeeded. The contract he negotiated with the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin only required Rückert to spend winter semesters in the Prussian capital. When classes ended he quickly retreated to rural Bavaria.

The literary journals in which Rückert published the majority of his work catered to a small national audience of upper-middle-class men and, more notably, women.Footnote ⁹⁹ Rückert escorted these readers on a Bildungsreise through the Middle East and Asia, presenting to them what he considered to be the shared cultural heritage of humanity, while at the same time reaffirming certain middle-class values as essentially German. “The height of erudition,” he asserted in the Weisheit der Brahmanen, was “to appreciate in foreigners / Their foreignness without severing oneself from the self.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Rückert's orientalia regularly appeared interwoven with his more mundane “German” verse in Cotta's Frauentaschenbuch, in Urania. Taschenbuch für Damen, as well as in the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände and the Taschenbuch zum geselligen Vergnügen. The orientalist dominated the Deutscher Musenalmanach (1833–9) to such an extent that it folded after he rescinded his contributions.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Rückert's contrasting depictions of female sexuality in his “German” and his “oriental” verse illustrate how the project of world poetry threatened an ideal of domesticity that defined the educated German bourgeoisie. In 1831, the Musenalmanach published Rückert's incomplete translation of the Amaruśataka, a collection of erotic Sanskrit verses written around 750 ce. According to legend, the mythical philosopher Shankara wrote the verses to win a debate on the nature of love with the wife of another philosopher. Ill-equipped to converse on the theme, Shankara entered the soulless body of the king Amaru as it lay on the funeral pyre, hoping that the king's many wives would induct him into the secrets of love.Footnote ¹⁰² Rückert rendered thirty-eight of the stanzas into what he termed “popular and emotional” German verses that were “generally readable.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Many years later, he completed the collection and improved the translations.

The Amaruśataka offered Rückert a possible model for spiritual rejuvenation and communion, the language of love serving as a metaphor for how the individual becomes subsumed within the divine. The various emotional states of a lover, ranging from separation, nostalgia, and the desire for intoxication and surrender, can be read as stages through which the devout must pass to commune with a greater force.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ At the same time, the Sanskrit poetry is a tantalizing evocation of female desire. Rückert strung together a series of vignettes in which the corsets of demure girls burst at the seams, sweat builds silently on perfumed breasts, jilted women softly melt at the touch of transient husbands’ hands, and wives go astray. Most are set in the home and involve women of social standing, similar to Rückert's readers, attended by maids and servants.

Rückert's articulation of female desire may especially have appealed to women.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The editors of the Musenalmanach seemed apprehensive enough to request from Rückert “nothing Chinese, nothing Sanskrit, rather German” for the next edition.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ His sentimental German verse counteracted the impact of the foreign by marking the cultural difference of German women and thereby the nation. Images of the gender roles Rückert considered appropriate for middle-class German families overflow in the poems he wrote celebrating marriage in the 1830s. There is no hint of female sexuality in these works. Rather, in “Hochzeitlieder” Rückert honored the German bride for being “rich in virtue, grace, morality, and modesty.” The foundation of bourgeois marriage was neither erotic desire nor longing. A “noble wife” governed the home with “diligence and decency.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In “Beruf des Weibes,” Rückert attributed to the German housewife all the duties of the proverbial angel in the house. The bourgeois home was a patriarchal order in which the wife sublimates her own will to her husband's every desire.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

For Rückert, attaining universality posed a threat to traditions that were German in a narrower sense, a concern that shaped his actual translation practices. As seen below, Rückert's figurative reconstruction of paradise subjected the foreign to selective translation and a process of Germanization. Nevertheless, a particular vision of Protestant Christianity resolved for Rückert the contradiction Lagarde otherwise saw in his pairing of cosmopolitanism and nationalism. In “Bau der Welt” Rückert explained that Europe had received a divine “beam of light” (Lichtstrom) from the “Orient,” as well as a “powerful torrent” (Machtstrom) in the form of “our ancestors,” the Germanic tribes. “United,” Rückert wrote, this “double current [Doppelstrom] pushed forward against Rome.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The project of world poetry glorified German speakers as a chosen people destined for cultural leadership and a universal religious mission. Protestants, especially, were equipped to return Christian spirituality to its original roots in the pagan East.

Despite an occasional reference to “Germanic blood,”Footnote ¹¹⁰ reconciliation and love were the lofty aspirations behind Rückert's oeuvre. The general fading of cosmopolitanism from German nationalist rhetoricFootnote ¹¹¹ in the second half of the nineteenth century does not in itself explain why, by contrast, Paul Lagarde was, in Suzanne Marchand's words, a “hater of epic dimensions.” His attempt to found a true faith on secure, scientific evidence drew more overtly on ancient “Aryan” cultures such as Armenian, Coptic, Sanskrit, Persian.Footnote ¹¹² Lagarde assumed that God had revealed to the German nation its own particular religious ideal as part of a spiritual struggle against the world and other nations. Germans were destined to combine evangelical piety with a unique form of inwardness that Lagarde associated with truthfulness, authenticity, and independence of mind. Jews, in his view, constituted a separate nation defined by their religion. Discriminatory legislation, Lagarde believed, should exclude Jews from public and financial life until the overwhelming power of a Germanic and evangelic faith forced their conversion.Footnote ¹¹³ Rückert welcomed Semitic traditions into the German patrimony provided they underwent a process of cultural translation.

III. CULTURAL TRANSLATION AND THE FOREIGN

The reality of translating ambitious texts into German slowly dampened Rückert's plans for transcending Babel. The actual proficiency he gained in foreign languages during the 1820s and the strides taken in comparative philology towards more sober linguistic genealogies disrupted Rückert's youthful expectations. In the foreword to his rendition of the Maqamat or The Assemblies (1826) of Al Hariri of Basra (1054–1122), Rückert thus argued that the “principles” by which translators “Germanized” Homer or Shakespeare were “hardly applicable to an Arabic poet.” German readers lacked the “closer relations” necessary to appreciate a strict translation of this text—an elaborately rhymed cycle of episodic stories composed in prose with short poetic passages. Named for the location near a fire where nomadic tribes once assembled in the evening, Hariri's Maqamat recounts the adventures of Abu Zayd, who wanders through the Arabic provinces as a beggar after the Byzantines drive him from Saruj, his wealthy hometown. Rückert resorted to a “free reproduction” (Nachbildung) of twenty-four of the fifty original episodes in which a traveling narrator stumbles upon Abu Zayd in a series of ever-changing appearances, including that of a blind man. Other Rückert translations, including Nal und Damajanti (1828), Rostem und Suhrab (1838), the Hamâsa of Abu Temmâm (1846), followed a similar pattern. In Rückert's view, Middle Eastern and South Asian texts contained culturally specific material that jeopardized what he termed “the cursory attention of the recreational German reader.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ A process of cultural translation was necessary to make Hariri's verse inteligible.

Rückert's approach only seemingly ran contrary to the stricter standards of translation that emerged in early nineteenth-century Germany. Earlier translators had acted like original authors, freely altering the tone, style, diction, form, and content of texts to conform to audience expectations. In the late eighteenth century, the new links scholars such as Hamann and Herder established between language, nationality, and thought encouraged translators to honor the intent and cultural context of the original author. The prospect that words evoked culturally specific meanings called into question whether ideas existed independently of their medium of expression.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In his essay “On the Different Methods of Translating” (1813), Friedrich Schleiermacher thus asked German readers to assume a viewpoint “which is actually foreign to them.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ This required the translator to invest his text with unfamiliar cultural references, unexpected vocabularly, and startling linguistic structures, as well as to resist alterations that acclimatized the text to new surroundings.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Conceived during the Napoleonic occupation, Schleiermacher's approach to translation had clear nationalist overtones. Since Luther the act of translation had been regarded as an integral part of German cultural existence; his Bible translation earned the distinction of having consituted a national identity by forging German linguistic unity.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Schleiermacher's model of “foreignizing translation” reacted against the perceived cultural hegemony of French neoclassicism, its aristocratic patrons, and the “domesticating” practices common in France and Britain.Footnote ¹¹⁹ French translators produced quasi-independent literary works only loosely related to the original; a substantial degree of editorial freedom was tolerated in the name of good taste and “delicatesse.” English translations were distinguished by their practicality and their emphasis on the transferal of knowledge, a response to the demands of colonial rule.Footnote ¹²⁰ The early German Romantics were more sensitive to the presence of cultural and historical difference in literary texts and desired to preserve the otherness of the original just as they stressed the uniqueness of German culture.

The principles of foreignizing translation, however, did not apply equally to “oriental” texts. Rückert's practices complied with expectations of accuracy in this regard. Schleiermacher argued that a “free imitation should first awaken and sharpen the delight in what is foreign” so long as the educated part of a nation still had little familiarity with the culture of the text's origin. The practice of imitation conceded that certain texts had to undergo a “substantial transformation” before being appreciated by German readers.Footnote ¹²¹ In the notes published with his West-östlicher Divan (1819), Goethe similarly proposed that translation practices evolved through three historical epochs, each corresponding to a particular mode of translation. Prose summaries could facilitate German readers’ first exposure to the foreign without disturbing “our national domesticity.” Parodistic translations imitated foreign texts but could only aspire “to represent foreign meaning . . . with one's own meaning.” The final, most perfected, stage wished “to make the translation identical with the original” so that it could “stand in place of the other.” According to Goethe, each national literature had to progress through these stages individually, so that a prosaic translation of the Schah Nameh was still appropriate while the better-known Sakuntala could now support a translation of the third mode.Footnote ¹²²

For Rückert, the difficulty of translating “oriental” texts lay in the mutual incompatibility of languages, a challenge for any language pairing but one accentuated when mapping non-European idioms onto German. The meaning of words, he noted, was “unsteady . . . iridescently ambiguous.” Even when conveying nuances in simple terms, translators, Rückert argued, must gaze into the very depth of the sea. The inability to find proper words in one's native tongue produced “agony” for the poet. “The more you understand” a language, Rückert concluded, “the less translatable” it becomes.Footnote ¹²³ Philology, in a sense, complicated Rückert's ambitions as a poet. In one verse, for example, he recounts speaking Sanskrit in his dreams with a mysterious Brahmin, but abruptly breaking it off as his “criteria grew too critical.” The beautiful verses of his poetic unconscious “dissolved upon waking into whimsical haze.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Rückert's frustrations with the act of translation lay largely in his inability to adapt German adequately to a foreign language.Footnote ¹²⁵ Here playing poetry against philology served him well. Poetic license assumed blame for errors in philology, while strict adherence to language explained any awkward turn of phrase.Footnote ¹²⁶

In this fashion, Rückert endeavored to enhance the “representability” (Darstellbarkeit) of the Maqamat by overtly Germanizing or repressing aspects of the text that appeared untranslatable. His chief concern was accurately reproducing the “artistic creation” and “the peculiar form” of the text, especially its stylized rhymed prose, for which he was prepared to suppress “all . . . disturbing peculiarities.” His first efforts at translation eliminated “everything unfamiliar, all unintelligible references with which the text abounds.” Later he allowed annotations and explanations designed to “educate and amuse the German reader.” When references appeared too obscure, Rückert simply resorted to “substitutions” or cut portions of the original text. These aspects of the text were, in his view, merely tied to its chance historical location. Remnants of the lost language of paradise lived on for Rückert in the different meters, rhyme schemes, and rhythms not yet present in German. His intention was to show that “even in this extravagant form a spirit lives” that could only be made visible in this form.” Rückert apologized for “the spurious Oriental taste” which he thus introduced to German literature: “the endless plays on words and sounds, the rhymed prose, the exaggerated images, the crafty, exaggeratedly artificial expression.” German readers, he reckoned, were already accustomed to diverse styles. Hariri's difficulty guaranteed that German writers would not sacrifice “dominant good taste” for his opaque ways.Footnote ¹²⁷

Many of Rückert's twists and turns in the Maqamat reveal an exceedingly clever use of language and etymology. In “Das alte Weib” episode, for example, Rückert builds on a pun Hariri makes on the Arabic words “undergarments” and “poems,” both of which derive from a similar root: sh-`-r. The original Arabic reads roughly as follows: “She spoke: First I show you my undergarments [‘ash'ira] and then I'll turn you into the transmitters of my poems [‘ash'aar].” Rückert transposed it in such a way that the original reference to shabby garments, as well as the affinity between clothes and words, is maintained: “Seht erst meines Gewandes Undichten—und dann meine Gewandtheit im Dichten!” (“First see the leakage in my robes—and then my agility in poetry.”) The German terms Gewand (garment) and gewandt (nimble) are effectively opposed, as are the words undicht (pervious) and Dichten (writing poetry).

In other cases, Rückert employed a heavier hand. As Mahmoud Alali-Huseinat details, Rückert's Maqamat replaced difficult allegories, metaphors, and word plays with ones that German readers understood more easily.Footnote ¹²⁸ The thirty-ninth episode, “Der Schulmeister von Hims,” for example, includes a closing speech by a local teacher that adds amusing references not present in the original. The following excerpt plays on similarities in the sounds of the German words Viele (many), lügen (to lie), and Philologen:Footnote ¹²⁹ “Du lügst, um zu leimen,—und rügst, um zu reimen;—du gehörst zu den Philologen,—die so heißen, weil Viele logen” (You lie in order to layer,—and reprimand to rhyme;—you belong to the philologists,—so called because many lied).Footnote ¹³⁰ Rückert often manipulated his translation to increase the number of rhymes. In the same episode, Rückert added a dizzying ode to the city of Hims entirely of his own inventionFootnote ¹³¹:

Even in the early nineteenth century, arabists criticized Rückert for the “arbitrary liberties in his arrangement,” finding many of his embellishments and substitutions unnecessary.Footnote ¹³³

Rückert's translations admittedly opened new cultural spaces in German literature. He introduced, for example, previously unfamiliar poetic forms, such as the maqama and the qasideh, an elaborate fifty- to one hundred-line rhyming panegyric with a consistent meter, into the German literary repertoire.Footnote ¹³⁴ Lagarde's own interest in orientalia dates to his reading “some of the most beautiful ghazals of Hafiz-Rückert” in a German literary anthology designed for gymnasium students.Footnote ¹³⁵ Rückert's orientalizing poetry exposed educated Germans to alternative cultural models not derived from European antiquity. His highly successful Weisheit des Brahmanen, for example, offered readers a melange of moral lessons and philosophical truths through the character of a Brahmin. The “faith and manner of thinking” of multiple cultures could be reconciled, Rückert proposed, just as the Indo-European languages ultimately comprised “One language alone.” The Weisheit des Brahmanen united, among other things, philosophical principles from the Bhagavadgita and Rumi's pantheism.

Yet Rückert remained unwilling to cede ultimate cultural authority to oriental sources. The Brahmin's wisdom, he explained, was “not purely brahmin,” rather “purely human.” Rückert comforted readers with the notion that much of it “a European acquaintance had entrusted unto him” and presented the text in rhymed Alexandrine meter.Footnote ¹³⁶ The text largely consists of Rückert's own reflections on issues of general concern in Europe.Footnote ¹³⁷ “Everything I am now reading must be included,” Rückert wrote of his composition, “8 weeks ago Spinoza, 14 days ago astronomy, now Grimm's extremely rich German Mythology, everything behind the loosely held-up mask of the Brahmin.”Footnote ¹³⁸ An intricate web of reassurances and dilutions mediated the German encounter with the foreign.

Critical readings of Rückert's translations suggest that his reliance on imitation produced a hierarchical form of hybridity in which German conventions dominated. The more unfamiliar the source language, the more thoroughly Rückert overhauled the translation, as in his adaptation from Latin of a collection of Chinese folk songs in 1833. Here Rückert substituted Christian terms and biblical sayings to replace myths and religious rituals in the original; he even inserted familiar landscapes with known animals and trees, as well as scenes from the German Middle Ages that included mounted knights and courtly tournaments.Footnote ¹³⁹ The comparative philologist Franz Bopp similarly noted in 1829 that Rückert's “nationalization” of Nal und Damajanti exchanged the original Sanskrit meter for the rhyming pairs of old Swabian poets.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Such alterations eased the entry of Rückert's translations into German cultural space and allowed German speakers to take possession of texts as building blocks in the creation of a cosmopolitan national identity. One reviewer characterized the Maqamat “as a German work of art for a German public,” evidence that German culture had reached “a cosmopolitan standpoint.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ “Too great a striving for accuracy,” the Arabist J. G. L. Kosegarten claimed, would have produced a text “completely unintelligible and ridiculous to European readers.”Footnote ¹⁴² As it was, reviewers regularly warned their audience about the unsettling effects of Rückert's orientalia. “Most German readers,” one critic cautioned, would need “some practice . . . to be able to endure” the rhymed prose of the Maqamat; they should not be “frightened away.”Footnote ¹⁴³ Reviews of the Östliche Rosen advised German readers to take “only short strolls” into Rückert's perfumed rose gardens, followed by rapid retreats,Footnote ¹⁴⁴ so that the departure from everyday “work, worries, and earnestness” did not appear “strange.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Rückert believed that Hariri would forever remain “untranslatable.” Linguistic differences testified to a gap between Arabic and German culture that could never be mediated. The “core itself, the focus” of the Maqamat, Rückert asserted, was bound so tightly to the “original language” that it withered when severed from Arabic.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Most reviewers supported this diagnosis of untranslatability. The orientalist Friedrich Rosen believed the material basis of Arabic metaphors and their connections to Bedouin life so obscured their meaning that the Arabic language “stubbornly resists every exact translation.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Heinrich Ewald, an arabist and Old Testament scholar, concurred that “our relatively much poorer language” rendered a “true and conscientious copy” of the Maqamat impossible.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Reviewers and Rückert himself presumed, nevertheless, that German translations achieved equivalency with foreign originals. There was a tendency within world poetry to replace and declare superfluous works in the source language. The Östliche Rosen may unsettle German readers, one reviewer claimed, but this implied authenticity: “for Orientals Rückert would have become a second Hafiz.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Rückert himself depicted the effective translator emerging as a “true Oriental.” As his collection of Rumi's ghazals opens, Rückert portrays the translator as “a blank mirror” refracting light from the East. He directs readers away from his own person:

The poet then adopts a turban and Persian dress; he embraces Islam, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism in hopes that Rumi will “not be far, oh, be not far!” Eventually, Rückert emerges as the very embodiment of the east—“I am the East,” “I am the orb of the sun”—and takes possession of the ghazal as a poetic form for German national literature.Footnote ¹⁵¹ According to Lawrence Venuti, replacing one national tongue with a langauge seeking an international presence threatens the former with invisibility and helps establish cultural dominance in an age of globalization.Footnote ¹⁵²

Rückert's cultural translation represents a variation on what Bhabha terms the “imperialist noun”Footnote ¹⁵³ that takes possession by naming space. The German language could only claim to transcend Babel by engulfing foreign texts and bestowing upon them world cultural significance. This required a process of improvement. Rückert concluded his Maqamat translation with the observation “I ought not be ashamed for doing it badly, / Rather, that I've made something bad too good.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Such assertions aimed to secure for Germany a position of cultural leadership in Europe. For Rückert, the domesticating translation practices of the French and English could never replicate the spirit of foreign literature as well as the German language. German, in his view, had a particular capacity for compound formations and complex sentence structures that rendered it uniquely suited to translating foreign texts. The greatest difficulty of translating the Sakuntala, for example, Rückert explained, was replicating the “immense, snake-winding meter of Sanskrit verse” (schlangenwandelnde Sanskritversmasskolosse). Ancient Indic poets loved to wind and twist the thread of meaning woven through their work into intricate webs and mazes, he concluded, which French and British translators could not match. Only Germans, in Rückert's view, preserved this vitality.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Indeed the success of his own translation hinged in part on Rückert's exploiting the German language's capacity for compound formations.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

When Rückert's collected works appeared in 1834, their first reviewer concluded that the German home and province, not the Orient, lay at the heart of his oeuvre. Dr Mises acknowledged the “Oriental palace” that Rückert had outfitted with a dazzling display of gold and jewels. On top of this palace, however, stood a “a little hut” in which Rückert chose to live. His visitors were escorted through many “magnificent chambers.” After these distractions, Mises advised readers, “you will most long for repose in his own little cabin.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Rückert's efforts to transform his mother tongue into a new language of paradise were to benefit the German nation. The mixture of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in his work reflects not the postcolonial conditions of late eighteenth-century Germany, but the more confident Vormärz. The nation ultimately took priority for Rückert over universalizing forms of religious identification.

This helps explain why a disillusioned Rückert turned his back on the Middle East and Asia after mid-century. A day before revolution struck Berlin in March 1848, Rückert retreated to his Bavarian estate and negotiated a permanent release from his teaching responsibilities. Few students had subscribed to Rückert's grand project due in part to increasing scholarly specialization within the field of philology. Never having engaged intellectual and social life in the Prussian capital, he “happily” exchanged his “unbearable post” for the “old beloved solitude” of the province. Political resignation and Luise's death marred Rückert's last years. After Friedrich Wilhelm IV rejected German unification under a liberal constitution in 1849, the “failed German empire” forced Rückert further into the “empire of poetry.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ “Rückert's life neared its end under great sorrow and affliction,” Paul de Lagarde concluded, “he set the unreachable goals of detecting language in many languages and humanity in many peoples: for this reason he met none of them.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Rückert increasingly sought solace in the familiar world of classical antiquity. “My work in Persian suffered a great interruption this winter,” he confessed to Lagarde in 1851, “due to my Greek studies.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ A friendship with the Erfurt classicist Johann Adam Hartung (1801–67) rekindled Rückert's lifelong interest in Greek metrics and poetry. He ceased studying Sanskrit as literature, approaching the language “only occasionally now for general linguistic comparisons.” In 1857, Rückert wrote to the publisher Heinrich Brockhaus looking to sell all but select books from collections he received from the Oriental Translation Fund and the Oriental Text Society. Two years later Rückert had his name withdrawn from the membership list of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft and asked Brockhaus to return a recently submitted translation of Persian poetry.Footnote ¹⁶¹

Unable to re-create the language of paradise in a fallen world, Rückert lost confidence in his project. The scholarly community had relinquished the romantic idealism of his youth in favor of an increasingly scientific and historicized philology. Rückert's expectations for liberal nationalist reform had likewise fallen short. His appropriation of Persian, Arabic, and Indic texts had produced something new and syncretic in the German literary repertoire. The encounter of the self with its own reflection in the foreign opened the type of in-between space conceived by Homi Bhabha. Yet local and national concerns severely limited Rückert's receptivity to difference. His acts of cultural translation ultimately entailed a radical process of Germanification that engulfed most elements anterior to it. Those aspects of the ancient East that contemporaries failed to recognize as part of their own cultural heritage could only be rendered meaningful through their re-creation in German forms. His re-creations were always selective and excluded parts of the foreign as irremediably other.

A vain attempt to reconcile the world's languages through comparative grammar occupied Rückert's final decade. In the summer of 1861 he reported being “deeply immersed in Coptic, a true bridge between Semitic and Indo-Germanic.”Footnote ¹⁶² A number of comparative philologists, including Theodor Benfey (1808–81), regarded Coptic as a potential bridge between the two language families. But after Rückert's death, when his son asked Lagarde to publish this research, he refused, not wishing to tarnish the poet's reputation.Footnote ¹⁶³ Rückert may have suspected the folly of his attempt to resurrect Babel, citing “mole-like blindness” in his efforts to penetrate the “interwoven roots of the world's oldest languages.” “Satisfying a vain desire for knowledge” was the only true benefit of language study: no one could “ever unearth the salvation of humanity.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴

The aged orientalist appears to have succumbed to the aura of aesthetic and moral normativity that enveloped classical Hellas. Ancient Greece offered long-established cultural models more attractive to the liberal German bourgeoisie than Asia and the Middle East. “To forget our own distress,” Rückert confessed in the poem “Rückkehr,” “We wished to travel the world over.” But the great pyramids merely masked disturbed graves; thorns plagued the rose gardens of Persia. “Soon we felt homesick,” Rückert declared, “To tread again the well-known path of the Odyssey and Iliad.” The poet left behind the flooded plains of the Ganges and the “Forests where demons abide, and misshapen gods rule.”Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, was preferable to Rückert in her simple beauty than the fifty-three million Indian Apsarases who sprang from the sea bedecked in spectacular jewels. “Bow down before the one,” he pleaded, “who herself bows in gracious modesty!”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Germans would do best to honor a European projection of bourgeois gender norms. Local images of femininity ultimately prevailed over a more cosmopolitan appreciation of world literature.