berthele - translating twain's jim

d:/socio4-4temp/05-berthele.3d 3/10/0 10:58 disk/mp

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Journal of Sociolinguistics 4/4, 2000: 588613

Translating African-AmericanVernacular English into German:

The problem of Jim in Mark TwainsHuckleberry Finn1

Raphael BertheleUniversity of Fribourg, Switzerland

This paper focuses on the most important problem translators are faced withwhen translating Mark Twains Huckleberry Finn into German: how can thespeech of the African-American character Jim be rendered? When translatingJims passages substantial problems arise because there is no exact Germanequivalent of AAVE. This paper examines both orthographic and other lin-guistic strategies to dierentiate Jims voice over the last hundred years. Thishistorical analysis shows that in most translations before the 1960s, thesestrategies downgrade Jims linguistic and cognitive faculties, depicting hisspeech as a grammatically simplified pidgin. More contemporary translations,however, opt for devices that depict Jim in colloquial and spoken language thatdoes not carry the same amount of sociolinguistic stigma. Thus, changingtranslation techniques shed light on prevailing attitudes toward non-standardvarieties of both German and English.

KEYWORDS: Orthography, AAVE, German translation, literary dialect,translation history

INTRODUCTION

The fundamental intent of every literary translation is to strive for maximumequivalence of source text and target text (Catford 1974: 27). However,translation theory is still grappling with how to define equivalence (Wilss1980: 156.) or authenticity (Meid 1993: 449) towards the original text onboth the denotational and connotational levels. Probably one of the most diculttasks for a literary translator is to find target-language equivalents for dialectal orsociolectal speech in the source text. This kind of translation engages thetranslators understanding of the complex set of sociolinguistic relationshipsbetween varieties in both the source and the target language. These include:

1. the sociolinguistic relationship of standard and non-standard source-language varieties;


2. the authors ideas about 1;3. the authors attempt to render 1 in the literary text and his/her purpose and

intentions for the use of non-standard varieties;4. the sociolinguistic relationship of standard and non-standard target-lan-

guage varieties;5. the translators ideas about 1, 2 and 3;6. the translators attempt to render 1 (or what s/he thinks to be 1) in the

target language, based on the translators understandings of 4.

In this paper, I explore these issues and relationships through the analysis ofGerman translations of Mark Twains Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with aparticular emphasis on the way that non-standard orthography is used in theGerman versions to render Twains representation of an American socio-linguistic reality. My specific focus will be on the way the speech of theAfrican-American character Jim is translated.

Huckleberry Finn is a particularly rich text to study from this perspective,because of the large number of German translations in its more-than-100-yearhistory. The very number of translations is in itself convincing evidence for theexemplary status this novel has in the German-speaking world. For the Germanreader, this book was an important contribution to the construction of a veryspecific image of America in which the issue of Black-White cultural andlinguistic relations no doubt played a significant role. That is, the status ofAfrican Americans and their speech constituted a significant form of culturalotherness through which Germanophones explored their own culture. Thesetranslations can thus be viewed as cultural positionings vis-a`-vis that otherness.

In their eort to reproduce the sociolinguistic setting in Twains fictionalworld, translators attempt to re-create in German what they believe to be afaithful mirror of relationships 1, 2 and 3 (above). The sociolinguistic analysis ofthese translations thus reveals the translators positions on the meaning ofsociolinguistic dierences, both for the historical society represented in thenovel, as well as for the German-speaking society for whom they translated.They also reflect translators assessments of Twains perspective on the value ofthe speech of the African-American characters he portrayed.

Literary dialects as strategies of authenticity

Twains dialect writings are part of an important literary dialect tradition in theU.S. As Sumner Ives says, nearly all examples of literary dialect are deliberatelyincomplete; the author is an artist, not a linguist or a sociologist, and hispurpose is literary rather than scientific (Ives 1971: 147). One classic literary/artistic purpose of using dialect writing is to establish authenticity of persons,historical and geographical settings. In his preface to Huckleberry Finn, Twainwrites: The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guess-work; but pains-takingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of

TRANSLATING AAVE INTO GERMAN 589

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personal familiarity with these several forms of speech (Twain [1884] 1988:lvii). In other words, he identifies his dialect use as a deliberate choice motivatedby the goal of literary realism. The authenticity of his regionally rooted Missouricharacters is created and explicitly signaled by written representations ofhow they really speak.

According to contemporary reviews (Hutchinson 1993: 122), these eortswere considered successful. Holtons assessment Mark Twains representationof Jims dialect is certainly extremely well done (1984: 88) is representative ofmany modern evaluations of this aspect of Twains work. Considerable workhas already been done to locate the dialects in Twains book (cf. Roulon 1967;Carkeet 1979; Fisher Fishkin 1993; Southard/Muller 1993), and there is noconsensus about the number of distinguishable dialects in Huckleberry Finn. Forthe purposes of this discussion, I will leave aside the question of how accuratelyTwains literary dialect represented 1840 AAVE in Missouri. The important andundisputed fact is that there is a big dierence between the dialect of black andwhite people in Twains novel.2

The relativity of sociolinguistic prestige

It is possible that what Preston writes about folkloric transcriptions that almostevery respelling (non-standard spelling) makes the reader feel to be critical of thespeaker (1982: 322) also applies to literature such as the novel in the scope ofthis paper. This is because respellings are a cue for dialectal variation, anddialectal variation is almost invariably linked to social hierarchy and dierentia-tion which relegates those who do not speak the standard to a lower position.

Yet the meanings of dialectal variation are not limited to the oppositionbetween high and low prestige, because dialectal variation is also socio-linguistically linked to other sources of social value than prestige. Not only cannon-standard dialects have in-group value (covert prestige Trudgill 1972,1983: 85), but they also obtain value relative to other non-standard forms andtheir speakers. In opposition to the standard, non-standard speech can alsohave positive moral connotations, establishing the speaker as natural, sincere,without artifice. Seen from a normative point of view, almost none of thecharacters in Twains text speak a pure prestige variety. I take the position,therefore, that to understand the meaning of non-standard spellings in a literarytext in general, and in particular, the sociolinguistic meaning of the majorstrategies of translating Jims speech, one must consider them in relation to:

1. the speech of the other characters in the novel;2. the history of the use of sociolectal, dialectal and stylistic variation in

German literature;3. editors or translators comments in prefaces, afterwords and blurbs;4. passages in translators manuals that deal with the translation of dialects,

sociolects or ethnolects.

BERTHELE590



Rather than attributing absolute values to literary non-standard language,we have to apply a flexible evaluation of the relation between a standard orquasi-standard (in a specific literary text, in a literary genre, in parts of theGerman literary tradition) and deviations from the standard. This standard doesnot necessarily have to be the standard language, however it is certainly thecase that the more or less codified standard language is the central point ofreference.

The translation data

Twains book was published in 1884. The first German edition I could find datesfrom 1890 and was translated by Henny Koch. This text was very successfuland often reprinted without major changes until the 1940s. Later in the20th century new translations or editions of Huckleberry Finn were publishedalmost every year by many dierent publishers in Germany, Austria andSwitzerland. Some of these translations (for example, the one by Marie Schloss)have been re-edited several times over a long time span, others did not make itto a second edition. During my investigation I collected about 40 Germaneditions by almost 30 translators. Roughly 20 of these translators wereidentifiable and about 10 translators names are not mentioned at all. Thedata I present in the following stem from a selection of 13 translations which Ihave selected at more or less regular intervals over the last 100 years.3

To assess the linguistic features used by the translators, I chose a longerpassage (749 words, 6 paragraphs) in chapter 8, shortly after the meeting ofHuckleberry Finn and Jim on an island near St. Petersburg, where Jim tellsHuck how he ran away from his slave-owners (see appendix for Twains originaltext). This passage was chosen because it is the first (and probably the longest)continuous stretch of Jims direct speech.

The linguistic representations found in the 13 translations can be separatedinto two broad categories: orthographic features and features above the level ofspelling. The categories in the orthographic section are very much inspired bythose proposed by Preston (1982: 325). In contrast to Prestons corpus (ofacademic folklore texts), however, orthographic features are used only in veryfew cases to render regional variation. Below, I summarize the key features oftranslators representations of Jims speech:

1. Orthographic features:a. sound/syllable loss;b. reanalysis (change of spelling on the basis of auditory analysis of spoken

language);c. modification (the written counterpart of coarticulation and assimilation);d. eye dialect (violation of standard spelling without eect on pronunci-

ation);e. idiosyncrasies and spelling mistakes.




2. Features above the level of spelling:a. stylistic variation in the lexicon: use of colloquial and regional words;b. morpho-syntactic features: violations of Standard High German;c. syntactic features: violations of standard grammar and representation of

regional dialectal features;d. modifications of Jims speech: replacement with indirect speech; partial

or full omission.

While many of these features are used to translate non-African-Americancharacters dialects, in almost all German translations African-American char-acters can easily be distinguished from others. The African-American characterseither exhibit dierent linguistic features or they show a considerably higherdensity of certain features. This is consistent with Roulons analysis of Twainsoriginal text, in which he finds only two distinct dialects: a mixture of Caucasian(South) Midland and Southern speech on the one hand, and a mixture of Negro(South) Midland and Southern speech on the other hand (Roulon 1971: 219).

In the analysis below, I enumerate the devices used by translators in theTwain corpus, and also describe how similar devices were/are used in Germanliterature. Based on this comparison and contrast, I go on to divide the mainfeatures found in the German texts into two categories: those which establishdierence that is, define Jim as a character who speaks dierently from mostother characters and those which establish deficit that is, represent Jim as associally, linguistically and even cognitively deficient.

NON-STANDARD SPELLING

Sound/syllable loss

This category includes all cases of sound loss on the syllabic level or below, asthey occur in some dialects/sociolects, in fast speech (allegro forms) or in moreinformal style. In the original text, Twain makes extensive use of this device (cf.appendix, 7: spec to steal a skift long de sho) and it is of course probable that theGerman translations which use this feature as well were inspired by the Englishtext. The use of the loss-device is by far the most frequent orthographic strategyin the German texts examined here.

Jim4 Standard High German English1. n Niggerhandlah (Harranth) ein Niggerhandler a nigger trader2. kriegen-n (Koch) kriegen ihn get him3. Kuferladn (Harranth) Kuferladen cooper shop4. isnich (Harranth) ist nicht is not5. auf m (Rathjen) auf dem on the

In example 3 the syncopation is quite normal in spoken SHG (Standard HighGerman), therefore this example could be attributed to the category eye dialect(see below).

BERTHELE592



In German literary texts, there is quite a long tradition of rendering sound lossthrough spelling. The following two brief examples illustrate my more generalobservation that in German-language literature, the use of the loss devicegenerally characterizes spoken language and colloquial style, and is often (butnot categorically) used for the speech of persons belonging to lower socialclasses. Examples 612 are taken from Theodor Fontanes novel Stine, and showhow loss is typically used in realistic literature to represent spoken language(the examples are all from direct speech uttered in rather informal contexts):

Tokens from the speech of Lierschen, a lower-class woman (Fontane [1890] 1973a: 175):SHG English

6. nich nicht not7. un und and8. is ist is9. Sepratschlussel Separatschlussel reserve key

10. grad gerade just

Tokens from the speech of the Count (Fontane [1890] 1973a: 208):11. hab habe have12. wies wie es how it

Fontanes novel is set in the Berlin of the late 19th century, and the lower-class characters show typical features of the local urban vernacular. Whilesound loss is used in the examples above to represent the speech of both low andhigh-status characters, there are some dierences in the salience of the lossesmarked for the person of lower social rank. Examples 11 and 12 in the countsspeech stand for quite conventional and stylistically almost unmarked phenom-ena such as the apocope of the unstressed 5-e4 and the clitization of thepronoun es. In contrast, the loss of the final consonant of nicht and und inthe womans speech (examples 6 and 7) are less conventional and therefore,more salient indices of colloquial, sloppy and uneducated pronunciation.

In the translation corpus, we see that the apostrophe as a means to indicatesound loss5 is used to a very varying extent. Many translators do not set theapostrophe every time sound loss occurs, as Table 1 shows clearly. If sound lossis frequent in a certain text it can give the type a very unusual appearance, as inthe case of the recent translation by Rathjen:



Table 1: Sound loss in two translations

Harranth Rathjen SHG English

is is ist iss 's es itn 'n ein a (indef. art.)nich nich' nicht not


13. Na ja, weisst, is so elaufen. Die olle Missus ch mein Miss Watson die hackt ndauend auf mir rum un ehand lt mich ziem ich gropp, a er hat imme esagt,dasse mich nie runter nach Orleans vscherbeln wurd. A er ch hab emerkt, da wan Niggerhanler inner Gegnd am Rumtreibn neuich, und wird mir langsammulmich. (Rathjen, see appendix, 13)

Rathjen makes an extensive use of the loss device, indicating each loss withan apostrophe. This extensive use of sound loss makes Jims account barelylegible the reader almost has to read the passage aloud in order to understandit. Significantly, the consonantal losses (aer for aber, elaufen for gelaufen,ehandelt for behandelt etc.) are not reminiscent of fast, colloquial speech or ofany other variety of German and I could not find any German literary textswhich make a comparably striking and unconventional use of loss. The densityand rather strange use of orthographic devices here actually generates a veryartificial variety, both from the graphical and from the (presumed) acousticpoint of view.

By way of comparison, the passage quoted above appears in Harranthstranslation as follows:

14. Nu, siehsdu, s kam so: Die alte Missus wo Missus Watson is immah hacktsie aufmir rum und nimmt mich machtich hart ran, hat abah auch immah gesagt, sieverkauft mich nich nach Orleans runter. Nu seh ich abah schon die langste Zeit nNiggerhandlah in unsre Gegend, und da hab ich angefangt mit Angst kriegn.(Harranth, see appendix, 13)

In Harranths text, the loss device is applied in a more modest way and is notmarked with an apostrophe, which makes his text more legible and fluent.Overall, we can see that while sound loss has been used from the early Germantranslations onwards, its frequency and salience increases in the more recenttranslations.

Reanalysis

Preston (1982: 325) distinguishes between three forms of reanalysis: metath-esis (pert for pretty), clitization (kinda) and phrasal groups (godamighty).Metathesis is quite frequent in Twains original text (e.g. appendix, 2: awluz).I did not, however, find any examples of clitization that go beyond the standardforms (deyd), and there are also no phrasal groups. In the German translationcorpus there are no cases of metathesis, but there are a few tokens representingrespelled phrasal groups (cf. ex. 19, 20). Clitization (ex. 1518) however is quitefrequent in the more recent texts, as the following examples show:

Jim SHG English15. sagich (Harranth) sag(e) ich I say16. hamse (Rathjen) haben sie they have17. mitm (Rathjen) mit dem with the18. inner (Rathjen, Harranth) in der in the

BERTHELE594



19. habichmich (Harranth) habe ich mich I have myself20. konnsiesich (Harranth) konnen sie sich they can themselves

We can find some rare examples of reanalysis in the first German translationby Koch:

21. Denken er, wenn Jim gehen zu Fuss, kriegen-n [kriegen ihn/get him] die Hunde,wenn er stehlen Schi, kriegen-n die Menschen, er mussen haben Floss, Floss seingut, lassen keine Spur hinter sich. (Koch, see appendix, 19)

However, this feature has not been used frequently in the years since Kochstranslation (cf. Figure 1 below). In Schonfeldts text I found only one token (solls= soll es) and it is only with the recent attempts by Harranth and Rathjen thatreanalysis is used more frequently and for more interesting purposes:

Harranth SHG English22. siehsdu siehst du you see (see app., 1)23. hacktsie hackt sie she pecks (see app., 1)24. wos wo es where it (see app., 11)25. vonnem von dem of the (see app., 12)

Most clitization stands for stylistically unmarked allegro forms of spokenGerman. In German literature, it first appears with the realistic or naturalisticauthors, and is mainly used to render the speech of the lower classes. This isillustrated by Theodor Fontanes work, where the many tokens of cliticizedforms are used to represent the speech of lower-class characters:

Fontane [1890] 1973a: p. 176.SHG English

26. kommste kommst du do you come27. verstehste verstehst du do you understand28. wenns wenn es if it29. furn fur einen for a

Modification

The category of modification in the corpus is visible in the orthographicrepresentation of coarticulation and assimilation. Very often modificationoccurs together with sound loss or reanalysis (cf. Preston 1982: 325), andthe more frequent the depicted phonological processes are, the more modifica-tion results in eye-dialect-like orthographies. Although it is not alwayspossible to distinguish standard modifications from non-standard ones,some of the orthographically marked modifications in both Twains originaltext and some of the translations index phonological deviation from thestandard pronunciation.

Modification is one of the characteristic features of Twains spelling of the Jimpassages (cf. appendix): dey = there; er = or; mawnin = morning; doan =dont; dah = there. In the corpus of Twain translations, however, modification




appears only in the latest texts. It is almost always combined with thereanalysis/phrasal groups feature.

Jim SHG English30. vonnem Mord (Harranth) von dem Mord of the murder31. hamse (Rathjen) haben sie they have32. weisste (Rathjen) weisst du you know33. inner (Rathjen, Harranth) in der in the34. gropp (Rathjen) grob coarse

As none of the German translations with the exception of Wurth opts for aconsequent dialect translation of Jims passages, modification is not used for theorthographic equivalent of phonetic dierences between German dialects. Allexamples quoted above stand for colloquial, maybe quick but definitely near-standard speech.

Looking again for models from German literature, we find examples ofmodification beginning with the realists. In Fontane (cited above), modificationis the third most frequently used orthographic strategy to characterize dialectalspeech or the speech of lower social classes (e.g. haste for hast du [you have]and gehste for gehst du [you go] Fontane [1890] 1973a: 177f.).

Eye dialect

Just as in the English original (wuz = was, Illinoi = Illinois, see appendix, 25),the translator may use a device generally called eye dialect: familiar words arerespelled in a way that violates orthographic norms but, in contrast to thestrategies mentioned so far, does not reveal any particularities of pronunciation,style, dialect or sociolect. In this sense eye dialect really has no significancewhatever to the scientific student of speech (Krapp 1971: 29). As anorthographic deviation from the norm, however, eye dialect may well havesignificance for the sociolinguistic analysis of literary speech forms. Eye dialectcan be used to portray characters who are supposed to speak dierently (thanother characters, than the standard language) without really having themspeak dierently. The eect of dierence is limited to the graphic appearance ofthe text. This dierence on the spelling surface may not a priori signify adevaluation of a certain character but is nevertheless subject to sociolinguisticreallocation. Examples of eye dialect in the translations are:

Jim SHG English35. abah (Harranth) aber but36. Ufah (Kruger) Ufer bank of the river37. machtich (Harranth) machtig mighty38. mulmich (Rathjen) mulmig uneasy39. wahten (Eger) waten to wade40. duh (Eger) du you41. guht (Eger) gut good

BERTHELE596



These cases of eye dialect represent standard pronunciations of standardspellings:5er4 in final position in SHG is pronounced [] (35, 36). The deri-vational morpheme {-ig} is pronounced [Ic] in SHG which can be renderedperfectly well with the spelling5-ich4 (ex. 37, 38). The5h4-grapheme in ex.3941 is a length-marker for the vowels [a:] in waten and the [u:] in du and gut.

I was not able to find any comparable forms in German literature until thebeginning of the 20th century. In the (fortunately) almost unknown novel from1918 Die Sunde wider das Blut by the German author Arthur Dinter ( [1918]1921), the author uses many orthographic and grammatical strategies todistinguish the Jewish characters from the other characters in the novel. Oneof the features used is the transcription with 5ai4 of the German diphthong[aI] for which the standard spelling is 5ei4:

42. Wie haisst [heisst/means] nicht maine [meine/my] Erfindung? [. . .] Wenn ich kannzahlen von mainem [meinem/my] Geld den Erfinder und ihm kann abkaufen furbares Geld de Erfindung, is das dann nicht maine [meine/my] Erfindung? (Dinter[1918] 1921: 50, italics in the original)

Because the 5ai4-graph is even closer to the standard pronunciation thereis clearly no phonological motivation for this spelling feature. In Dinters casewe can be sure that he modified the spelling of the speech of Jewish characters inorder to portray them as speaking without German competence (Richter 1995:289). The spelling modifications are a reflection of Dinters racist sentiments:that a Jew, even if his native language is German, will never be able to speak/think/act as a real German.

The relatively late discovery of eye dialect in the German context mayexplain the rather late appearance of this device in our translation corpus: thefirst translator who uses it is Eger in 1944, but the frequencies are scarcelyworth mentioning before the 1990s, in Harranths and Rathjens texts. In theserecent translations eye dialect functions to amplify the colloquial, spoken speechstyle of a uneducated, socially inferior character.

Idiosyncrasies and spelling mistakes

It is obvious that all the spelling modifications described above are violations ofstandard orthography. Although most of the respellings seem to be more or lessmotivated, some of them cannot be explained by the attempt to transcribestylistic, dialectal or sociolectal variation. Sometimes it is dicult to decidewhether they are intended by the translator or are simply due to bad type-setting:

43. Neulich ich aber sehen, dass Mann, was handelt mit Nigger, zu ihrr [ihr/her]kommen. (Eger, see appendix, 3)

This respelling does not resemble any German variety; it may be thetranslators attempt to transcribe an idiosyncratic pronunciation feature in




the highly deficient learner language (see below) he assigns to Jims character. Itis uncertain if this token is an intended violation of German spelling because allthe rest of Jims narration is, as far as spelling is concerned, highly accurate.Another rather enigmatic case is the use of the English spelling for the Germanpreposition fur:

44. Legen sich Jim in die Schilf for [fur/for] zum Warten. (Koch, see appendix, 14)

Again this respelling is an isolated case. In Kochs translation we come acrosstwo obviously idiosyncratic respellings of wahrhaftig [really], namely warraftigand warratig, but apart from that Koch makes use of orthographic devices onlyfor the transcription of sound loss. However, both Koch and Eger also usesomething like a Gastarbeiter-Deutsch [guest worker German] on the gram-matical level. This suggests that these respellings (however unsystematic) areused to amplify the deficit-character of Jims speech (see section 3 for discussionof grammar).

Misspellings are also used for foreign words. Transfer from English seems to bethe favorite object of this kind of orthographic originality:

45. Ladys (Harranth) ladies46. Schentlman (Harranth) gentlemen47. Jenlmen (Rathjen) gentlemen

I am not quite sure about the intended eect of this transfer from English.Example 46 probably stands for German-accent pronunciations of the Englishword; 47 could be motivated by the original spelling in Twains text (genlmen,cf. appendix, 11). This transfer could be the attempt to introduce some elementsof the source language in the German text to remind the reader of the textsorigins. Alternatively, the misspellings could indicate a speaker who is notcosmopolitan because he cannot pronounce foreign words properly.

In sum, clear-cut instances of spelling mistakes that mark their speakers aslinguistically deficient are rare and haphazard in this corpus. Alone, they aredicult to interpret; we have to see how they are used in conjunction with non-standard elements above the orthographic level.

NON-STANDARD ELEMENTS ABOVE THE ORTHOGRAPHIC LEVEL

Lexical features

The category colloquial words does not need much further explanation: alltranslators more or less frequently choose words that tend to be avoided incareful speech. Examples are:

Standard spelling English48. zappeldustah (Harranth) zappelduster pitch-dark49. stockfinstr (Harranth) stockfinster pitch-dark50. verdrucken (Schonfeldt) to slip away

BERTHELE598



51. absausen (Kruger) to slip away52. verduften (Schonfeldt) to slip away53. vscherbeln (Rathjen) verscherbeln to flog

As examples 48, 49 and 53 show, the use of non-standard lexemes can becombined with orthographic modifications such as sound loss or eye dialect. It isunnecessary to give a complete list of lexemes that can be labelled colloquial:they are used to translate both Jim and Hucks speech in all the translationsstudied, and occur much more frequently in the more recent translations.

The admittedly fuzzy category Regional Words includes all lexemes thatcharacterize a speaker from any rural part of the German speaking world.These are the words the Duden Dictionary usually classifies as landschaftlich[regional]. Examples are nimmer [never] (NN 1980) or, again, duster [pitch-dark] (Rathjen). Colloquial and regional words have a similar stylistic eect on theGerman-speaking reader as many of the non-standard spelling features men-tioned above. Moreover, the literary depiction of registers other than the sociallyor regionally unmarked German standard has been widespread ever since therealist period. Not surprisingly, many of the non-standard lexemes found in thetranslation corpus can also be seen in Fontanes texts (e.g. duster Fontane [1890]1973b: 116). It seems fair to interpret the use of such features in the translations ofHuckleberry Finn as a literary-realist attempt to create a parallelism between thesocial status of the two runaways and their literary speech form.

It is probably in order to amplify the eect of the morpho-syntactic andsyntactic features that translators sometimes choose unusual variants of anobvious direct translation. In one notable example, Beheim-Schwarzbach hasJim say Versammlung mit Beten (Beheim-Schwarzbach 1966) instead ofGebetsversammlung [Twain: camp-meetn]. This clumsy paraphrase symbolicallyestablishes Jim as a person who does not know or does not find the right words.

Morpho-syntactic features

Many of the linguistic particularities of the translation corpus have to do withthe German morpho-syntactic system. Learners of German as a secondlanguage are aware that there are many ways of violating well-formedness inthis area. In the source text there are no parallels to the following features. Thefirst three categories are extremely frequent in the translations up until the1960s. They involve violations of the German morpho-syntactic system, eitherin terms of congruence, case-marking or gender:

Jim Standard Form54. congruence: und Stromung sind reissend und die Stromung ist

gewesen (Schloss) reissend gewesen[and the torrent were raging] [and the torrent was raging]

55. case: sindn ganze (=nominative instead sind den ganzen Tag wegof accusative) Tag weg (Harranth,cf. appendix, 15)




56. gender: die Platz (= feminine article der Platzinstead of masculine; Schloss) [the place]

A good example of a similar learner variety is the French character Dumontin Ferdinand Raimunds play Der Verschwender ( [1834] 1960):

57. Ja, Messieurs, der Natur [die Natur, nature; wrong gender, m instead of f] sein gro.[. . .] Der ganzen Nacht [Die ganze Nacht, the whole night; wrong gender, m insteadof f, and unidentifiable case because of wrong congruence between article andadjective] bin ick am Fenster gelegen, um der Gegend [die Gegend, the landscape;wrong gender, m instead of f, and wrong case, nominative instead of accusative] zubetrachten. [. . .] Ein wahrer Naturfreund mussen ihrer Schonheit [ihre Schonheit,her beauty, genitive instead of accusative] auch im Schlaf bewundern konnen.(Raimund [1834] 1960: 26.)

None of these violations of German grammar can be assessed as colloquialor regional features discussed above; they stand unambiguously for a lack oflinguistic competence. The fact that these violations do not occur sporadicallybut in large numbers in the translations allow us to exclude the hypothesisthat they represent the occasional errors of a native speaker of German. Giventhe resemblance to Raimunds Frenchman Dumont, it seems clear that thesegrammatical failures characterize Jim as a learner of the German language.The implications of constructing such a learner-language will be consideredbelow.

Another very striking feature that points in exactly the same direction is theuse of what I call infinitive language. It can be found in almost all translationsuntil the 1960s. Jims speech is full of undeclined infinitives (or past participles)for the whole verbal paradigm:

Jim Standard Verb Form58. Tja, das sein gewesen so (Beheim- Tja, das ist so gewesen / war so

Schwarzbach, see appendix, 1)59. Ich Berg hinablaufen und Schi Ich lief den Berg hinab und

stehlen wollen (NN, see appendix, 7) wollte ein Schi stehlen

This type of infinitive language is a characteristic of the very first stages ofa learner language (cf. Diehl et al. 2000: 165) and quite common amongpeople who learn German in an unmonitored setting.6 In German literaturethis type of speech is widely used for the speech of idiots, savages or, of course,for L2learners of the German language. There are some good examples ofinfinitive language in the Dumont-passages quoted above (sein gross insteadof ist gross; Naturfreund mussen [. . .] bewundern instead of mussbewundern, etc.). Probably the most striking example for the present context,the extremely successful German writer Karl May, uses infinitive language forAfrican Americans. In his novel Old Surehand, published in 1894, Nigger Bobsays:

BERTHELE600



May [1894] 1983: 500 Standard syntax My translation60. Bob nur machen Spass, Bob macht nur Spass, Bob only kidding,

schonen Spass! Bob doch schonen Spass! Bob wird nice kidding! Bobnicht werden fliehen lassen doch den Indianer nicht not going to letIndianer, wenn er soll fliehen lassen, wenn er escape Indian, ifaufpassen auf ihn! auf ihn aufpassen soll! he must keep an

eye on him!

Bobs speech is not only full of infinitives but also exhibits other grammaticalerrors such as wrong word order and missing articles. Bob in Mays novel isthe characteristic loyal, good-hearted but quite dull-witted slave, who makeseverybody laugh with his ridiculous way of talking and acting.

There is another early and particularly revealing parallel to the syntacticfeatures described here: the play Weh dem, der lugt, written in the 1830s by theAustrian poet Franz Grillparzer. A character named Galomir speaks in a way thatparallels strongly the examples cited above (Grillparzer [1840] 1960: 237):

61. Noch einmal rufen. [. . .] Hup! [. . .] Ah! Niemand horen.[Call again. Nobody hear.]

This character is explicitly portrayed as simple-minded; even his fianceeaddresses him as der dumme Galomir [stupid Galomir] (cf. Grillparzer[1840] 1960: 231). This fragmentary pidgin-like language plays an importantrole to generate humorous eects in Grillparzers comedy.

The evidence from the German literary texts is unambiguous. Having Jimspeak in infinitives portrays him either as foreign, uneducated or simple-minded. A Jim who speaks this way was an object of ridicule for both translatorsand readers in the first half of the twentieth century both from a cognitive andlinguistic point of view he is presented as deficient.

There are several other morpho-syntactic features in the translation corpusworth mentioning. In Twains English original Jim sometimes uses non-standard forms for the past participle or the past tense, especially those ofstrong and irregular verbs. Just for once this device works in the very same wayin German (and in this respect, the translation authentically represents theoriginal):

Jim Standard Verb Form Twain62. ich hab geweisst ich habe gewusst I knowed (see

(Harranth) appendix, 15)

As in the English original, irregularities and exceptions in the linguisticsystem can be used to dierentiate the less educated and the educatedcharacters in the novels fictional world. However, there are very few examplesof this sort of translation, and despite the quest for authenticity in literarytranslation this feature remains almost unused in the German translations.Harranth (1995) is the only translator to exploit irregularity in this way.




Syntactic features

The most frequently used devices to mark Jims speech syntactically areviolations of German grammar, in particular, wrong word order and missingarticles:

Jim Standard syntax English63. Ich Berg hinablaufen und Ich lief den Berg hinab [steal boat instead of

Schi stehlen wollen (NN, und wollte ein Schi steal a boat]see appendix, 7) stehlen

This recalls Bobs speech (cf. also example 60):

64. Indianer [Der Indianer/the Indian] soll nicht werden hauen und schlagen, auch sollnicht werden erstechen oder erschieen, und Masser Bob ihn doch nicht fortlassen.Da Masser Bob sein klug und pfig und ihm binden acht lange Stangen auf Buckel[auf den Buckel/on his back]. (May [1894] 1992: 433)

Missing articles and wrong word order have a very strong connotation asfeatures produced by beginning German language-learners.

Double negation is another syntactic feature found in the corpus. In German,as in English, it is a way of intensifying negation associated with archaic ordialectal speech. In most Swiss German and southern German dialects, forinstance, double negation is still quite common especially in certain idiomaticphrases. In SHG, however, it is no longer current (cf. Drosdowski 1984: 644;Helbig/Buscha 1991: 527; Zifonun, Homan and Strecker 1997: 857).

65. Da sa ch mir, n Flooss is, was ich brauch; das macht namich keine Spurn nich.(Rathjen, see appendix, 20)

66. Hab aber kein Gluck nich gehabt. (Schonfeldt, see appendix, 27)

As in the case of non-standard past tense forms, the use of double negationhas very similar sociolinguistic connotation eects in English and in German,but only three translators take advantage of this parallel (cf. Figure 1).

A regional syntactic feature used in two more recent translations is therelative clause with the dialectal wo instead of one of the SHG pronouns der,die, das etc:

Jim Standard syntax Twain, see appendix, 1067. sie in jedm Boot, wo in jedem Boot, das every skift dat went long

vorbeikommt vorbeikommt(Harranth)

This use of the wo-pronoun is a marker of southern dialects in the German-speaking area. Although it is a violation of SHG grammar, its use has none ofthe pidginized connotations of most of the morpho-syntactic errors attributedto Jim in the translation corpus.

BERTHELE602



Modification of Jims speech

It has already been mentioned above that some translators choose to completelyor partially rephrase Jims narration. In the paragraphs investigated here,translators using indirect speech either give Jim no direct voice at all orcombine reported speech and direct speech with features of deficit. In Egerstranslation from 1944 the indirect rephrasing of parts of Jims narration isintroduced by a revealing phrase. Huck says:

68. Aus dem, was Jim weiter berichtete, erriet ich, [. . .] dass er alles im Stich liess undHals uber Kopf aus dem Hause eilte [. . . ]. (Eger)

The bold text in example 68 means, that Huck guessed from Jims narrationwhat had happened. Jim is presented as someone whose verbal output is hardlyintelligible and must be made accessible through guessing. In some translationsJims account is simplified or shortened, and Walter Keiler in 1927 even omits itcompletely without any replacement.

In some cases, the translators add details to Jims narration. But when theydo, it is mainly to generate an eect of simple-mindedness:

69. Wenn armes Jim laufen mit die Fusse, Hunde werden finden seine Spur. (Schloss)[My translation: If poor Jim walk with his feet, dogs would track him.]

Here the translator Marie Schloss has Jim express the self-evident fact that heusually walks with his feet. In a clear example of racist attribution of stupidity toJim, Henny Koch has Jim think that African-American people are not seen atnight (Jim refers to himself in the 3rd person):

70. Er denken, Nacht sein schwarz, Jim sein auch schwarz, werden also nix gesehen.(Koch)[My translation: He think, night be black, Jim be black, too, will not be seen.]

Jims thought cannot be found in the source text (cf. Appendix) and its additiontherefore is an enormous liberty of the translator.

FROM COGNITIVE DEFICIT TO SOCIOLINGUISTIC DIFFERENCE

The evolution of translation strategies

As we have seen in the previous sections, it is very dicult to assignunambiguous meanings to translation variants. We have to take into accountthe complex sociolinguistic relationships between non-standard and standardvarieties as well as the semiotic layers of the relevant literary texts. There isquite a wide range of possible sociolinguistic interpretations for a specificlinguistic feature. However, as demonstrated above, some translation devicesare both added by the translator (they have no equivalents in the source text)and are clear-cut signs of the translators devaluation of Jims speech. Thesefeatures are mainly situated on the morpho-syntactic and syntactic levels:




violations of number and gender congruence, wrong case markers, infinitivelanguage, wrong word order and missing articles. Evidence from Germanliterature makes it very clear that these devices do not simply serve to situatea character on a certain level in the sociolinguistic stratum, but also brand thatcharacter as being other as well as deficient (cf. Dumonts foreigner talk andthe stupid Galomir).

BERTHELE604


18

90

Ko

ch

19

13

Sch

loss

19

21

Ste

ind

or

19

27

Kei

ler

19

44

Eg

er

19

50

Wes

elo

h

19

63

Kru

ger

19

66

Beh

eim

-Sch

wa

rzb

ach

19

70

Hel

mst

aed

t

19

78

Sch

on

feld

t

19

80

NN

19

95

Ha

rra

nth

19

97

Ra

thje

n

Colloquial Words Regional Words Dialectal Syntax Double Negation Eye Dialect Sound/Syllable Loss Reanalysis Modification Spelling Mistakes Congruence Mistakes Genus Mistakes Case Mistakes Infinitive Language Missing Articles Wrong Word Order Reported Speech

Figure 1: German editions and their use of linguistic features for Jims speech.If a given translation uses a certain feature it is marked with a + sign in thecorresponding column: The bold horizontal line separates linguistic featuresthat create dierence in the upper part from linguistic features that unambigu-ously create deficit in the lower part. The shaded lines indicate the featureson the level of spelling; the other features are above the level of spelling


On the contrary, orthographic depictions of dierence are not always as clear-cut indices of cognitive deficit; only spelling mistakes play this role unambigu-ously. In all other cases, respellings can index (relatively neutral) regionallinguistic dierences or (ranked) sociolinguistic dierences. Here we find ampleevidence in German literature that the frequency of non-standard orthographycorrelates positively with lower social strata. The use of sociolinguistically lowerregisters certainly responds to the quest for equivalence between source andtarget text. In Twains fictional world both Jim and Huck belong to lower socialstrata, and have only very rudimentary educations. While it is certainly truethat cognitive deficits are often stereotypically attributed on the basis of lowsocial status, I argue that social standing and intellectual (and even moral)worth are not necessarily represented as congruent in particular texts.

Figure 1 sums up the diachronic use of the features analyzed in thiscontribution. The shaded columns represent two translations which eithercompletely skip Jims narration (Keiler) or transpose it entirely into reportedspeech (Helmstaedt).7 The figure shows quite clearly that the earlier translationsmainly use deficit features whereas more recent translations (cf. Harrants andRathjens text) favor the dierence features.

This shift in translation features coincides with a change in the tone oftranslators prefaces and afterwords. Whereas the blurb of a reedition8 ofSchloss translation characterizes Jim as the Einfaltiger Neger Jim (simple-minded Nigger Jim), by the 1970s attitudes seem to have changed. In a prefaceto the 1978 translation by Schonfeldt, the editor explicitly informs the readerthat this novel is to be read as an appeal against slavery and disdain forAfrican-American people (Schonfeldt 1978: 305).9 Similar statements can befound in the blurb of a reedition (1979) of Lore Krugers translation.10 As aconsequence of this anti-racist and anti-discriminatory interpretation of thenovel, Schonfeldt has Jim speak a close-to standard German variety (cf. the veryfew +-signs in the corresponding column in Figure 1). This of course comeswith a considerable loss of linguistic diversity. If Jim is no longer to bediscriminated against, he can also not be distinguished linguistically any longer.

Hucks voice as a quasi-standard

In order to understand the history of the translation of Jims AAVE in German,we must go further than the classification of the orthographic and linguisticfeatures found in the translation corpus. In this section, I assess the non-standard features attributed to Jim through a comparison with the way thespeech of Huck Finn, the main character of the novel, is translated. Thiscomparison is particularly important because Huck is the first-person narratorin the novel, which means that his voice is the dominant one in the book.Hucks variety is therefore the quasi-standard inside the fictional world ofTwains novel. Deviations from Hucks standard can be sociolinguisticallymore prestigious, like the speech of the few characters who speak (or try to




speak) a near-standard variety (e.g. Miss Watson, Judge Thatcher), but Twainvery often uses such higher styles to make fun of the better people.

In this comparison of the translations of Jims and Hucks speech, there aretwo main issues; dierences in the distribution of deficit-features in Hucks andJims speech and the (quantitative) role played by non-standard spelling in thetranslations. There are some inevitable diculties involved in the operationa-lization of a concept like deficit-index. Since deficit features are predominantlylocated in the morpho-syntactic system, we have to create variables on the basisof how many phrases/sentences involve violations of German grammar. If weapply such an approach to the corpus, we find that in all translations up until1966 and in 1980, close to 100 percent of Jims utterances have some sort ofgrammatical violations. Hucks speech displays only some negligible andsporadic grammatical violations.

Since this kind of measure for both Huck and Jim would be invariant until thevery recent translations, I decided to do without the deficit-index for Huck Finnand to create a dierent variable only for Jim, referring to the matrix in Figure 1.If all of the eight deficit-generating strategies are used in a certain translation,Jim gets 100 percent, if none is to be found, he gets 0 percent.

The second kind of operationalization of deficit measures the proportion ofnon-standard spelling in Hucks and Jims passages. The variable is constructedon the basis of how many words11 (of all words in the analyzed passage) containnon-standard spellings. The translations which skip or paraphrase Jims narra-tion (Keiler 1927 and Helmstaedt 1970) had to be removed from thesedescriptive statistics. Figure 2 shows the development of the three variables.

At first glance Figure 2 shows that non-standard spelling does not appearvery frequently in the more modern translations. It is interesting, however, that

BERTHELE606


Figure 2: Non-standard spellings and deficit features


even at the low level seen in 1913, 1921, 1944 and 1963 there is a cleardierence in frequency between Huck and Jim. In 1921, 1944 and 1963 it isJim who has higher values. In 1913 Jims spelling is almost perfectly inagreement with the norm and it is Huck who shows more non-standardspellings. Simultaneously the course of the deficit-line leaves no doubt aboutthe strategies used to linguistically characterize Jim.

The two latest translations, from 1995 and 1997, show an importantincrease of the use of non-standard spellings as well as obvious dierencesbetween Jim and Huck. The first translation which shows a little more non-standard spelling compared to the deficit tradition is Krugers text from 1963.In 1997 Jim deviates in a drastic way from Hucks (and certainly all the othercharacters) non-standard-spelling rate. As the deficit-line shows, this is thefirst text to completely abandon the deficit-strategy and it is very probable thatthe expansion of other linguistic dierences in this text is in part a compensationfor the loss of such a salient feature of distinction. Although there are noperfect continuous lines, Figure 2 shows that translators gradually turn awayfrom the deficit features and use more and more respellings.

This change in translation strategies corresponds quite well to the (admittedlyspare) recommendations made by translation handbooks. For example, FritzGuttinger (1963) advocates translating literary dialects with a variety veryclose to spoken standard language, based on his view that translations ofdialectal speech into the dialects of the target language inevitably results ininadequate local stereotypes (Guttinger 1963: 189; for very similar claims seeLevy 1969: 101; Diller/Kornelius 1978: 82; Graf/Schonfeld 1983: 89). Thisphilosophy is consistent with the eect of most of the features in the upper halfof Figure 1.

In 1983, a workshop organized by the European translation committeefocused explicitly on dealing with Black American English (Graf/Schonfeld1983). This workshop led to the production of a glossary with AAVE lexemesand corresponding standard English paraphrases. In this document, AAVE isdefinitely no longer seen as a deficit-variety. Several translation strategies areweighted against each other and the participating translators seemed to give alight preference to the choice of a colloquial, slangy German which can belocated in the Ruhrgebiet, the important center of heavy industry in Germany(Graf/Schonfeld 1983: 89). This solution gives the German parallel to AAVE aclear proletarian overtone, and it is probably not too far from Harranths andRathjens translation attempts.

CONCLUSION

To conclude, I will reflect on two issues: authenticity in translation of dialectand degrees of stigma in non-standard representations of dialect speech. Themore recent translations show that there are always tensions and trade-os forthe translator who wants to authentically render novels in which dialectal




dierence plays a significant role. In Schonfeldts case, dialectal dierence issacrificed in order to not portray Jim in a negative light. As a consequence, Jimsdistinctive and non-standard voice does not come through at all in this version.At the same time, it is clear that finding an adequate German dialectalequivalent for Jims voice is a dicult task. It is possible to render AAVE witha sociolect or dialect that represents analogous (low) social strata or evenanalogous regional linguistic identity. But the analogy is, of course, nevercomplete; there is no perfect equivalent of Black:White race relations (andcorresponding sociolinguistic relationships) in the German-speaking world.Every German variety is also more than just class-based: each one carrieshistorical, regional or social connotations. In this respect, making Jim speak aBerlin underclass dialect, Saxonian dialect, Yiddish or Swiss German adds layersof social connotations that are by no means equivalent to the setting of Twainsnovel. The very latest translations avoid this dilemma in their representation ofJims speech with features that connote colloquial, casual German, at the cost,of course, of conveying the strong regional character of Twains book.

In their choices of how to represent Jims language, German translatorsposition themselves with reference to racism and segregation in the societyportrayed by Twain (and indirectly, in their own society). Some of theirrepresentational strategies ascribe greater deficit to Jims character thanothers, and over time, there is a shift away from the more stigmatizing ofthese strategies. In earlier translations, we find that some translators renderJims (but not Hucks) speech as a pidgin-like learners English, even though inthe English original, both Jims and Huck Finns speech deviate systematicallyfrom standard grammar. As neither the translations nor the source text provideany evidence for Jim being a speaker of another L1 than the one he speaks in thetext, these translations represent Jim as fundamentally deficient: as unable tospeak any language properly.

The first German text to abandon the deficit-model is Lore Krugers (1963)translation, in which we find very few deficit features but numerous non-standard spellings for Jim. This text marks the beginning of a more general shiftin the representation of Jim that is linked to social changes which increasinglysanction the expression of racism towards Africans and African Americans(reflected in the blurbs and afterwords of more recent translations mentionedabove). At the same time, translators continue to manipulate linguistic andgraphic features of their texts to capture Jims (and Hucks) sociolinguisticparticularities; in particular their proletarian, unschooled character. Jimsunschooled, ethnic English is symbolically rendered by translation strategiessuch as respellings (eye dialect, loss, reanalysis, modification), with specificlexical choices and some syntactic devices (double negation, regional syntax).

I have argued that these features index sociological categories, but do notnecessarily brand Jim as cognitively and linguistically deficient. This does notmean that these dierence-generating strategies cannot carry stigma. This isbecause the sociological categories they index are ranked; therefore respellings

BERTHELE608



and other strategies that index social dierence also stereotypically stigmatizesome speakers. But in fact in Twains novel and in the translations stereotypes are often turned on their heads, and there is no correlation betweenspeaking well and being intelligent or morally upright. Critics agree that Jim isthe only moral grown-up in the novel (cf. Fisher Fishkin 1993: 79.), and allGerman translations studied here are faithful in their representation of Jimsmoral worth. This returns us to an earlier point: that evaluations of the stigma-generating potential of particular orthographic and other linguistic representa-tions have to be made within specific sociolinguistic, historical and textualcontexts.

NOTES

1. Acknowledgement: I wish to thank Alexandra Jae and Harald Fricke for their veryvaluable comments and suggestions, and the Schweizerisches Jugendbuch-InstitutZurich, particularly Mrs. Villiger Abogso Fouda, who was extremely helpful forfinding many various German translations of Twains Huckleberry Finn.

2. Strictly speaking this dierence between African-American and white characters isundisputed only for the phonological level, cf. Fisher Fishkins (1993) critical studyof Hucks black voice.

3. One of the latest translations is Wurths (1997) Alemanic dialect text. This as faras I know first dialect translation in the German-speaking world is not easilycomparable to the standard German texts and has therefore not been taken intoaccount in the current contribution (for a detailed analysis cf. Berthele [in print] ).

4. All examples given here can be found in Jims utterances in the analyzed passageand for every example the corresponding translators name will be given in brackets.

5. cf. Drosdowski (1996): Regel 13, p. 23f.; Drosdowski (1984): 195, p. 120.6. This generalized use of infinitives can be found in the talk of the informants in

Frischherz (1997), all of which are persons seeking political asylum in Switzerland.7. After having detected this unexpected strategy I chose another passage in order to

look for the means of translation. It turns out that both texts give Jim a highlydeficient voice similar to the texts by Koch or Schloss. I decided however to keep toexactly the same passage for all translations because of the very striking andmeaningful fact that it is also possible to give a character as little speech/voice asabsolutely necessary.

8. Exact date unknown, probably in the 1950s, Atrium Verlag Zurich.9. Man kann und sollte das Buch als einen Appell gegen die Sklaverei und die

Missachtung der Schwarzen lesen.10. [. . .] ist die scharfe Kritik Mark Twains an den zeitgenossischen Verhaltnissen in

den amerikanischen Sudstaaten, an Rassendiskriminierung und Sklavenhaltungunuberhorbar.

11. As a word I counted every printed unity located between two blanks or of coursebetween blanks and punctuation marks.




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APPENDIX

Jims account

In Twain [1884] 1988: 53f.(1) Well, you see, it uz dis way. (2) Ole missus dats Miss Watson she

pecks on me all de time, en treats me pooty rough, but she awluz said shewouldn sell me down to Orleans. (3) But I noticed dey wuz a nigger trader rounde place considable, lately, en I begin to git oneasy. (4) Well, one night I creepsto de do, pooty late, en de do warnt quite shet, en I hear ole missus tell dewidder she gwyne to sell me down to Orleans, but she didn want to, but shecould git eight hundd dollars for me, en it uz sich a big stack o money shecouldn resis. (5) De widder she try to git her to say she wouldn do it, but Inever waited to hear de res. (6) I lit out mighty quick, I tell you.

(7) I tuck out en shin down de hill en spec to steal a skift long de sho somersbove de town, but dey wuz people a-stirrin yit, so I hid in de ole tumble-downcooper shop on de bank to wait for everybody to go way. (8) Well, I wuz dah allnight. (9) Dey wuz somebody roun all de time. (10) Long bout six in demawnin, skifts begin to go by, en bout eight er nine every skift dat went longwuz talkin bout how yo pap come over to de town en say yous killed. (11)Dese las skifts wuz full o ladies en genlmen agoin over for to see de place. (12)

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Sometimes deyd pull up at de sho en take a res bfo dey started acrost, so by detalk I got to know all bout de killin. (13) I uz powerful sorry yous killed, Huck,but I aint no mo, now.

(14) I laid dah under de shavins all day. (15) I uz hungry, but I warnt afeard;bekase I knowed ole missus en de widder wuz goin to start to de camp-meetnright arter breakfas en be gone all day, en dey knows I goes o wid de cattlebout daylight, so dey wouldn spec to see me roun de place, en so dey wouldnmiss me tell arter dark in de evenin. (16) De yuther servants wouldn miss me,kase deyd shin out en take holiday soon as de ole folks uz outn de way.

(17) Well, when it come dark I tuck out up de river road, en went bout twomile er more to whah dey warnt no houses. (18) Id made up my mine boutwhat Is agwyne to do. (19) You see ef I kep on tryin to git away afoot, de dogsud track me; ef I stole a skift to cross over, deyd miss dat skift, you see, en deydknow bout whah Id lan on de yuther side en whah to pick up my track. (20)So I says, a ra is what Is arter; it doan make no track.

(21) I see a light a-comin roun de pint, bymeby, so I wade in en shove a logahead o me, en swum moren half-way acrost de river, en got in mongst dedrift-wood, en kep my head down low, en kinder swum agin de current tell dera come along. (22) Den I swum to de stern uv it, en tuck aholt. (23) It cloudedup en uz pooty dark for a little while. (24) So I clumb up en laid down on deplanks. (25) De men uz all way yonder in de middle, whah de lantern wuz.(26) De river wuz arisin en dey wuz a good current; so I recknd at by fo in demawnin Id be twenty-five mile down de river, en den Id slip in, jis bfodaylight, en swim asho en take to de woods on de Illinoi side.

(27) But I didn have no luck. (28) When we uz mos down to de head er deislan, a man begin to come aft wid de lantern. (29) I see it warnt no use fer to wait,so I slid overboard, en struck out fer de islan. (30) Well, I had a notion I could lanmos anywhers, but I couldnt bank too blu. (31) I uz mos to de foot er de islanbfo I foun a good place. (32) I went into de woods en jedged I wouldn fool widras no mo, long as dey move de lantern roun so. (33) I had my pipe en a plug erdog-leg, en some matches in my cap, en dey warnt wet, so I uz all right.

Address correspondence to:

Raphael BertheleDepartement fur Germanistik

Linguistik des DeutschenUniversity of Fribourg

MisericordeCH-1700 Freiburg/Fribourg

Switzerland

[email protected]



berthele - translating twain's jim

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