Notes On Publication
WITH NOTES AND APPENDICES BY
O. W. WIGHT, A. M.
IN TWO VOLUMES
BOSTON
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street
Page 5 <https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moa/ABN0405.0001.001/5>
EDITOR'S PREFACE.
MADAME DE STARL'S GERMANY, which we agree with Sir
James Mackintosh in regarding as the greatest production of
feminine genius, constitutes, in our series of French Classics,
the fourth and fifth volumes of her works. The reader must
look in the first volume for Biography, Critical Estimates, Bibliographical Notice, etc.
We have used the translation published by Murray, in 1814.
We know not who was its author. It shows a singular combination of ability and carelessness. We have spent almost labor enough in its careful revision to have made a new translation, and, if we are not mistaken, the result is a better translation than could have been made by either party alone.
Madame de Stael's style, in which there is expressed a constant
admixture (thus to speak) of indefinite sentiment and definite
thought, is difficult to translate well.
Madame de Stael's book abounds in quotations from the best
German authors. The English translator took these all at
second hand, through the French. Except in two or three instances, we have substituted translations made directly from the German. It is almost useless to remark what a shadow of
a shadow must be an ode of Klopstock or a ballad of Goethe
when distilled through a language wholly different from the
German into English.
Our notes, drawn from too many sources to be indicated here,
are equal to nearly half the matter of the text. Our principal
object has been to give abundant and reliable information in
regard to the period since Madame de Stael wrote.