French—German and German—French Poetry Anthologies 1943–45

Abstract

In autumn 1943, the Parisian publisher Stock brought out a bilingual Anthologie de la poésie allemande des origines à nos jours ¹ compiled by the Germanist and translator René Lasne in collaboration with Georg Rabuse, an employee of the German Institute in Paris.² Lasne, a teacher at a Paris lycée who for a while had fought with the Wehrmacht on the eastern front,³ had translated most of the poems into cautiously metrical French prose. Where respected translations already existed, for example by Gérard de Nerval, Édouard Schuré, Catarina Pozzi and others, he restricted himself to reprinting these. The anthology opens with the ninth-century German Wessobrunn Prayer, the ‘Lorscher Bienensegen’ charm and other Old High German incantations,⁴ and closes with the Nazi poets Hans Baumann and Herybert Menzel.⁵ It was the first comprehensive collection of its kind, allowing French readers to gain familiarity with what the Institute considered to be the most important currents of German poetry from the Middle Ages to the present day. To be sure, no Jewish or other proscribed poets were included — no Heine, Wolfskehl, Brecht or Becher, no Else Lasker-Schüler or Gertrud Kolmar, to name but a few significant omissions. Instead, we find particularly numerous contributions from Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Rilke, George and Weinheber, and even Richard Wagner with excerpts from Tristan und Isolde in his own translation, along with several folk songs.