OPINIONS OF THE PRESS
ON THE FIRST EDITION.
“A new and excellent translation.”—Standard.
“The new English version of the German national epic is by no means the first that has been brought out. But it is probably the best of the five or six that have appeared.”—Speaker.
“A word may be said in praise of Miss Alice Horton’s metrical translation.”—Times.
“It is most fitting that ‘Bohn’s Libraries’ should include this truly magnificent piece of literature. ‘The Lay of the Nibelungs’ is the glory of the German nation, and justly so. Some archeologists claim for the poem an antiquily which loses ilself in the mists of ancient times, and it is not the least of its merits that it may be read to-day with eagerness and enjoyment.”—Liverpea! Daily Mercury.
“There have been other attempts to translate the ‘Nibelungen Lied’ from the quaint old Frankish dialect of the original, but of the three that have appeared in verse this latest essay is by far the most satisfactory.”—Daily Chronicle.
“The best metrical version of this fine poem that has yet appeared.” Morning post.
“It may be commended as a painstaking and meritorious effort to repraduce the great Northern epic in good Bible English, and in metre as near the original as may be.”—Scotsman.
“Mr. Bell has given us a very complete English edition of the ‘Nibelungen Lied,’ including the well-known essay by Carlyle, with notes new and old, a facsimile page from the St. Gall manuscript of the poem, and an index of proper names. Miss Horton’s translation is very successful, and goes a long way towards overcoming the natural objection which many people entertain against renderings of long foreign poems in English verse. As the editor says, a more or less close approximation is all that can be hoped for; and this particular version is as close to the form and spirit of the original as any other which we have seen.”—Educational Times.
“Miss Alice Horton has translated the Lay into fluent and easy verse, not very striking, nor, indeed, intending or pretending (observe the modest ‘metrically’) to be so, but distinctly pleasant and easy to read. Possibly a little more labour of correction, expended on certain places where the metre halts or the rhymes creak, would have been an improvement. But these 2,379 stanzas, each of four thirteen-syllabled verse, must have cost no little pains as it is, and we are much obliged to the translator for presenting the old epic in a shape which makes it easy to assimilate. . . . An index of names follows the translation, a useful addition in so complex a tale. Carlyle’s admirable essay, written when his style was at its best (in 1831), is prefixed.”—Spectator.
