Abstract
This essay contributes to the study of the reception of William Collins’s poems on the continent in the 18th century and introduces a little known German translation of Collins’s Oriental Eclogues by the Swiss poet, bookseller and engraver, Salomon Gessner. While focusing on the ways in which Gessner renders Collins’s eclogues into German, I shall contextualise the translation in terms of Gessner’s own theory of the idyll. It is through this reading of Collins as a writer of idylls, rather than as the author of the odes for which he was celebrated by the Romantics, that Gessner popularised the poet in Germany and Switzerland.
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Jung, S. Salomon Gessner and Collins’s Oriental Eclogues . Neophilologus 93, 369–376 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-009-9145-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-009-9145-0