Max and Moritz by Wilhelm Busch

Author:Wilhelm Busch [Wilhelm Busch]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782692546
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2019-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Translator’s Note

First published in 1865, the same year in which Lewis Carroll produced Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz needs little introduction to German-speaking readers. The mock cautionary tale of two young boys who terrorize the bourgeois inhabitants of their village, before coming to a sticky end themselves, brought the 33-year-old illustrator and poet almost instant fame. By the time of Busch’s death in 1908, the tale had gone through fifty-six editions and sold more than 430,000 copies. By 1925, sixty years after its original publication, Max und Moritz had reached its hundredth edition and racked up more than 1.5 million sales. Today, it remains a classic of German children’s literature, with its author frequently hailed in his homeland as one of the forefathers of modern comic books.

Despite dozens of translations and adaptations, Max und Moritz has not enjoyed anywhere near as much popularity in the English-speaking world. I believe that this is in no small part down to the nature of many of those previous translations, which have tended to follow the precise wording of the German too slavishly—at the expense of the linguistic “flow” found within Busch’s original text. Maintaining the rhyming couplet structure of the tale while translating the words into another language is certainly not a simple task, but in this new translation (published a little more than 150 years after the original) I have attempted a slightly looser style, seeking to convey the fun and energy of the German original without, hopefully, straying too far from the source.

Often this has only been made possible by slight alterations to the ordering of sentence parts, or by placing a greater emphasis on the general gist of what Busch wrote, rather than literally translating every word and phrase. On very few occasions, I have made changes to the text in order to make it more readily understandable to a modern audience, and particularly to younger readers who are unlikely to be familiar with words such as “spats”, “inkpots” or references to elderly relatives sneezing heavily after taking large pinches of snuff!

I have also taken the liberty of changing some of the characters’ names, with Witwe Bolte now turned into Widow Palmer (“A kind and gentle lady farmer”) while Lämpel and Böck both lose the umlauts from their surnames. After some deliberation, I have also “aged” “Onkel Fritz” into “Grandpa Fritz”, reasoning that uncles are no longer seen by today’s children as the elderly, authoritarian figures that they may have been perceived as in Busch’s time—although that may just be wishful thinking, now that I am an uncle myself!

For those who speak both German and English (or are perhaps learning one of the languages), the original German version has been included immediately after the English translation—and I hope that this will provide added value, by allowing readers to spot where I have made tweaks to improve the flow of the English translation.

The only phrase that I have deliberately altered due to its being significantly out of

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