Abstract
Whilst the essays in this collection have for the most part deployed a new historicist methodology, Cian Duffy here investigates briefly the fortunes of comparative literature as an academic discipline and considers the challenges involved in the study of influence and exchange between cultures and nations. The possibility of an influence on William Worsdworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ by the Danish romantic poet Jens Baggesen provides a test case for exploring the possibilities and the pitfalls of comparative reading.
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Notes
- 1.
For thorough, recent overviews of these attacks and responses to them, see César Domíngez, Haun Sassy, and Darío Villanueva, Introducing Comparative Literature: New Trends and Applications (London: Routledge, 2015); and Haun Sassy (ed.), Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
- 2.
Susan Bassnett, Comparative Literature: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia, 2003).
- 3.
See Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 82–83; and Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth, A Biography: The Early Years, 1770–1803 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), pp. 525–528. Wordsworth added four more stanzas in June 1802 and had completed the entire poem by 6 March 1804. It was first published in Poems in Two Volumes (1807), as ‘Ode’, and again in Poems (1815) under the longer title by which it is now known.
- 4.
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
- 5.
Jens Baggesen, Ungdomsarbeider, 2 vols. (Copenhagen, 1791), vol. 2, pp. 134–136.
- 6.
Andreas Andersen Feldborg and William Sydney Walker (eds.), Poems from the Danish (London, 1815), p. 43. The opening line is translated as ‘There was a time, and I recall it well’.
- 7.
Jens Baggesen, Gedichte, 2 vols. (Copenhagen, 1791), vol. 1, pp. 92–95. This translation begins ‘O! holde Zeit’ [O! lovely time].
- 8.
Feldborg and Smith translate, very liberally – and perhaps even influenced by Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ – as: ‘Those days were matchless sweet – but they are perish’d,/And life is thorny now, and dim, and flat;/Yet rests their memory – deeply – fondly cherish’d;/God! in thy mercy – take not that’ (p. 45).
- 9.
Feldborg and Smith translate ll. 3–4 as: ‘Oh! when I think of that, my warm tears swell,/And therefore in the memory I delight’. Baggesen’s own German translation reads: ‘Mein Herz gedenkt deiner, und ich weine,/Und dennoch denk’ ich deiner immer doch’.
- 10.
‘Saa bad jeg for min Fader, for min Moder,/Og for min Søster, og den hele Bye;/Og for Kong Christian, og for den Stodder,/Som gik mig krum og sukkende forbi’ [So I prayed for my Father, for my Mother,/And for my Sister, and the whole Town;/And for King Christian, and for the Beggar,/Who passed by me bent and sighing] (ll. 29–32).
- 11.
Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 1996).
- 12.
See Thomas De Quincey, The Works of Thomas De Quincey, gen. ed. Grevel Lindop, 21 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002), vol. 6, pp. 308–309.
- 13.
See De Quincey, Works, vol. 1, p. 293; and Grevel Lindop, The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (London: Weidenfeld, 1993), pp. 149, 193–194.
- 14.
See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks. Volume 1: 1794–1804, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 2 parts (London: Routledge, 1957), part 1, pp. 352–353; part 2, pp. 350–351.
- 15.
Brun’s ‘Chamouny beym Sonnenaufgange’ was first published in the second volume of her Gedichte in 1795 (pp. 1–4).
- 16.
See Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Flamingo, 1999), pp. 315–318.
- 17.
See Alan Grob, ‘Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode and the search for identity’, English Literary History, 32/1 (March 1965), pp. 32–61 (35); and Lucy Newlyn, Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Language of Allusion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 102.
Bibliography
Wordsworth, William, Poems, 2 vols. (London, 1815).
———, Poems, in Two Volumes, 2 vols. (London, 1807).
Riber, Hans Wilhelm (ed.), Poesier (Copenhagen, 1785).
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Duffy, C. (2017). Coda: Comparing the Literature of ‘the North’ – William Wordsworth and Jens Baggesen. In: Duffy, C. (eds) Romantic Norths. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51246-4_11
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