A Tramp Abroad (Penguin ed.)

by Mark Twain

  “Scarcely had these tones sounded, everywhere there began tumult and sound, as if voices above and below the water. On the Lei rose flames, the Fairy stood above, as that time, and beckoned with her right hand clearly and urgently to the infatuated Knight, while with a staff in her left she called the waves to her service. They began to mount heavenward; the boat was upset, mocking every exertion; the waves rose to the gunwale, and splitting on the hard stones, the Boat broke into Pieces. The youth sank into the depths, but the squire was thrown on shore by a powerful wave.”

  The bitterest things have been said about the Lorelei during many centuries, but surely her conduct upon this occasion entitles her to our respect. One feels drawn tenderly toward her and is moved to forget her many crimes and remember only the good deed that crowned and closed her career.

  “The Fairy was never more seen; but her enchanting tones have often been heard. In the beautiful, refreshing, still nights of spring, when the moon pours her silver light over the Country, the listening shipper hears from the rushing of the waves, the echoing Clang of a wonderfully charming voice, which sings a song from the crystal castle, and with sorrow and fear he thinks on the young Count Hermann, seduced by the Nymph.”

  Here is the music, and the German words by Heinrich Heine. This song has been a favorite in Germany for forty years, and will remain a favorite always, maybe:

  Lerelei.

  I have a prejudice against people who print things in a foreign language and add no translation. When I am the reader, and the author considers me able to do the translating myself, he pays me quite a nice compliment,—but if he would do the translating for me I would try to get along without the compliment.

  If I were at home, no doubt I could get a translation of this poem, but I am abroad and can’t; therefore I will make a translation myself. It may not be a good one, for poetry is out of my line, but it will serve my purpose,—which is, to give the un-German young girl a jingle of words to hang the tune on until she can get hold of a good version, made by some one who is a poet and knows how to convey a poetical thought from one language to another.

  THE LORELEI

  I cannot divine what it meaneth,

  This haunting nameless pain:

  A tale of the bygone ages

  Keeps brooding through my brain:

  The faint air cools in the gloaming,

  And peaceful flows the Rhine,

  The thirsty summits are drinking

  The sunset’s flooding wine;

  The loveliest maiden is sitting

  High-throned in yon blue air,

  Her golden jewels are shining,

  She combs her golden hair;

  She combs with a comb that is golden,

  And sings a weird refrain

  That steeps in a deadly enchantment

  The list’ner’s ravished brain:

  The doomed in his drifting shallop,

  Is tranced with the sad sweet tone,

  He sees not the yawning breakers,

  He sees but the maid alone:

  The pitiless billows engulf him!—

  So perish sailor and bark;

  And this, with her baleful singing,

  Is the Lorelei’s grewsome work.

  I have a translation by Garnham, Bachelor of Arts, in the “Legends of the Rhine,” but it would not answer the purpose I mentioned above, because the measure is too nobly irregular; it don’t fit the tune snugly enough; in places it hangs over at the ends too far, and in other places one runs out of words before he gets to the end of a bar. Still, Garnham’s translation has high merits, and I am not dreaming of leaving it out of my book. I believe this poet is wholly unknown in America and England; I take peculiar pleasure in bringing him forward because I consider that I discovered him:THE LORELEI

  Translated by L. W. Garnham, B. A.

  I do not known what it signifies.

  That I am so sorrowful?

  A fable of old Times so terrifies,

  Leaves my heart so thoughtful.

  The air is cool and it darkens,

  And calmly flows the Rhine;

  The summit of the mountain hearkens

  In evening sunshine line.

  The most beautiful Maiden entrances

  Above wonderfully there,

  Her beautiful golden attire glances,

  She combs her golden hair.

  With golden comb so lustrous,

  And thereby a song sings,

  It has a tone so wondrous,

  That powerful melody rings.

  The shipper in the little ship

  It effects with woes sad might;

  He does not see the rocky clip,

  He only regards dreaded height.

  I believe the turbulent waves

  Swallow at last shipper and boat;

  She with her singing craves

  All to visit her magic moat.

  No translation could be closer. He has got in all the facts; and in their regular order too. There is not a statistic wanting. It is as succinct as an invoice. That is what a translation ought to be; it should exactly reflect the thought of the original. You can’t sing “Above wonderfully there,” because it simply won’t go to the tune, without damaging the singer; but it is a most clingingly exact translation of Dort oben wunderbar,—fits it like a blister. Mr. Garnham’s reproduction has other merits,—a hundred of them,—but it is not necessary to point them out. They will be detected.

  No one with a specialty can hope to have a monopoly of it. Even Garnham has a rival. Mr. X. had a small pamphlet with him which he had bought while on a visit to Munich. It was entitled “A Catalogue of Pictures in the Old Pinacotek,” and was written in a peculiar kind of English. Here are a few extracts:

  “It is not permitted to make use of the work in question to a publication of the same contents as well as to the pirated edition of it.”

  “An evening landscape. In the foreground near a pond and a group of white beeches is leading a footpath animated by travelers.”

  “A learned man in a cynical and torn dress holding an open book in his hand.”

  “St. Bartholomew and the Executioner with the knife to fulfill the martyr.”

  “Portrait of a young man. A long while this picture was thought to be Bindi Altoviti’s portrait; now somebody will again have it to be the self-portrait of Raphael.”

  “Susan bathing, surprised by the two old man. In the background the lapidation of the condemned.”

  (“Lapidation” is good; it is much more elegant than “stoning.”)

  “St. Rochus sitting in a landscape with an angel who looks at his plague-sore, whilst the dog the bread in his mouth at-tents him.”

  “Spring. The Goddess Flora, sitting. Behind her a fertile valley perfused by a river.”

  “A beautiful bouquet animated by May-bugs, etc.”

  “A warrior in armor with a gypseous pipe in his hand leans against a table and blows the smoke far away of himself.”

  “A Dutch landscape along a navigable river which perfuses it till to the background.”

  “Some peasants singing in a cottage. A woman lets drink a child out of a cup.”

  “St. John’s head as a boy,—painted in fresco on a brick.” (Meaning a tile.)

  “A young man of the Riccio family, his hair cut off right at the end, dressed in black with the same cap. Attributed to Raphael, but the signation is false.”

  “The Virgin holding the Infant. Is very painted in the manner of Sassoferrato.”

  “A Larder with greens and dead game animated by a cook-maid and two kitchen-boys.”

  However, the English of this catalogue is at least as happy as that which distinguishes an inscription upon a certain picture in Rome,—to wit:

  “Revelations-View. St. John in Patterson’s Island.”

  But meantime the raft is moving on.

  CHAPTER XVII

  A MILE OR two above Eberbach we saw a peculiar ruin projecting above the foliage which clothed
the peak of a high and very steep hill. This ruin consisted of merely a couple of crumbling masses of masonry which bore a rude resemblance to human faces; they leaned forward and touched foreheads, and had the look of being absorbed in conversation. This ruin had nothing very imposing or picturesque about it, and there was no great deal of it, yet it was called the “Spectacular Ruin.”

  LEGEND OF THE “SPECTACULAR RUIN”

  The captain of the raft, who was as full of history as he could stick, said that in the Middle Ages a most prodigious fire-breathing dragon used to live in that region, and made more trouble than a tax collector. He was as long as a railway train, and had the customary impenetrable green scales all over him. His breath bred pestilence and conflagration, and his appetite bred famine. He ate men and cattle impartially, and was exceedingly unpopular. The German emperor of that day made the usual offer: he would grant to the destroyer of the dragon, any one solitary thing he might ask for; for he had a surplusage of daughters, and it was customary for dragon-killers to take a daughter for pay.

  So the most renowned knights came from the four corners of the earth and retired down the dragon’s throat one after the other. A panic arose and spread. Heroes grew cautious. The procession ceased. The dragon became more destructive than ever. The people lost all hope of succor, and fled to the mountains for refuge.

  At last Sir Wissenschaft, a poor and obscure knight, out of a far country, arrived to do battle with the monster. A pitiable object, he was, with his armor hanging in rags about him, and his strange shaped knapsack strapped upon his back. Everybody turned up their noses at him, and some openly jeered him. But he was calm. He simply enquired if the emperor’s offer was still in force. The emperor said it was,—but charitably advised him to go and hunt hares and not endanger so precious a life as his in an attempt which had brought death to so many of the world’s most illustrious heroes.

  But this tramp only asked,—“Were any of these heroes men of science?” This raised a laugh, of course, for science was despised in those days. But the tramp was not in the least ruffled. He said he might be a little in advance of his age, but no matter,—science would come to be honored, some time or other. He said he would march against the dragon in the morning. Out of compassion, then, a decent spear was offered him, but he declined, and said, “spears were useless to men of science.” They allowed him to sup in the servants’ hall, and gave him a bed in the stables.

  When he started forth in the morning, thousands were gathered to see. The emperor said,—

  “Do not be rash, take a spear, and leave off your knapsack.”

  But the tramp said,—

  “It is not a knapsack,” and moved straight on.

  The dragon was waiting and ready. He was breathing forth vast volumes of sulphurous smoke and lurid blasts of flame. The ragged knight stole warily to a good position, then he unslung his cylindrical knapsack,—which was simply the common fire-extinguisher known to modern times,—and the first chance he got he turned on his hose and shot the dragon square in the center of his cavernous mouth. Out went the fires in an instant, and the dragon curled up and died.

  This man had brought brains to his aid. He had reared dragons from the egg, in his laboratory, he had watched over them like a mother, and patiently studied them and experimented upon them while they grew. Thus he had found out that fire was the life principle of a dragon; put out the dragon’s fires and it could make steam no longer, and must die. He could not put out a fire with a spear, therefore he invented the extinguisher. The dragon being dead, the emperor fell on the hero’s neck and said,—

  “Deliverer, name your request,” at the same time beckoning out behind with his heel for a detachment of his daughters to form and advance. But the tramp gave them no observance. He simply said,—

  “My request is, that upon me be conferred the monopoly of the manufacture and sale of spectacles in Germany.”

  The emperor sprang aside and exclaimed,—

  “This transcends all the impudence I ever heard! A modest demand, by my halidome! Why didn’t you ask for the imperial revenues at once, and be done with it?”

  But the monarch had given his word, and he kept it. To everybody’s surprise, the unselfish monopolist immediately reduced the price of spectacles to such a degree that a great and crushing burden was removed from the nation. The emperor, to commemorate this generous act, and to testify his appreciation of it, issued a decree commanding everybody to buy this benefactor’s spectacles and wear them, whether they needed them or not.

  So originated the wide-spread custom of wearing spectacles in Germany; and as a custom once established in these old lands is imperishable, this one remains universal in the Empire to this day. Such is the legend of the monopolist’s once stately and sumptuous castle, now called the “Spectacular Ruin.”

  On the right bank, two or three miles below the Spectacular Ruin, we passed by a noble pile of castellated buildings overlooking the water from the crest of a lofty elevation. A stretch of two hundred yards of the high front wall was heavily draped with ivy, and out of the mass of buildings within rose three picturesque old towers. The place was in fine order, and was inhabited by a family of princely rank. This castle had its legend, too, but I should not feel justified in repeating it because I doubted the truth of some of its minor details.

  Along in this region a multitude of Italian laborers were blasting away the frontage of the hills to make room for the new railway. They were fifty or a hundred feet above the river. As we turned a sharp corner they began to wave signals and shout warnings to us to look out for the explosions. It was all very well to warn us, but what could we do? You can’t back a raft up stream, you can’t hurry it down stream, you can’t scatter out to one side when you haven’t any room to speak of, you won’t take to the perpendicular cliffs on the other shore when they appear to be blasting there too. Your resources are limited, you see. There is simply nothing for it but to watch and pray.

  For some hours we had been making three and a half or four miles an hour and we were still making that. We had been dancing right along until those men began to shout; then for the next ten minutes it seemed to me that I had never seen a raft go so slowly. When the first blast went off we raised our sun-umbrellas and waited for the result. No harm done; none of the stones fell in the water. Another blast followed, and another and another. Some of the rubbish fell in the water just astern of us.

  We ran that whole battery of nine blasts in a row, and it was certainly one of the most exciting and uncomfortable weeks I ever spent, either aship or ashore. Of course we frequently manned the poles and shoved earnestly for a second or so, but every time one of those spurts of dust and dèbris shot aloft every man dropped his pole and looked up to get the bearings of his share of it. It was very busy times along there for a while. It appeared certain that we must perish, but even that was not the bitterest thought; no, the abjectly unheroic nature of the death, —that was the sting,—that and the bizarre wording of the resulting obituary: “Shot with a rock, on a raft.” There would be no poetry written about it. None could be written about it. Example:Not by war’s shock, or war’s shaft,—

  Shot, with a rock, on a raft.

  No poet who valued his reputation would touch such a theme as that. I should be distinguished as the only “distinguished dead” who went down to the grave unsonneted, in 1878.

  But we escaped, and I have never regretted it. The last blast was a peculiarly strong one, and after the small rubbish was done raining around us and we were just going to shake hands over our deliverance, a later and larger stone came down amongst our little group of pedestrians and wrecked an umbrella. It did no other harm, but we took to the water just the same.

  It seems that the heavy work in the quarries and the new railway gradings is done mainly by Italians. That was a revelation. We have the notion in our country that Italians never do heavy work at all, but confine themselves to the lighter arts, like organ-grinding, operatic singing, and a
ssassination. We have blundered, that is plain.

  All along the river, near every village, we saw little station houses for the future railway. They were finished and waiting for the rails and business. They were as trim and snug and pretty as they could be. They were always of brick or stone; they were of graceful shape, they had vines and flowers about them already, and around them the grass was bright and green, and showed that it was carefully looked after. They were a decoration to the beautiful landscape, not an offense. Wherever one saw a pile of gravel, or a pile of broken stone, it was always heaped as trimly and exactly as a new grave or a stack of cannon balls; nothing about those stations, or along the railroad or the wagon road was allowed to look shabby or be unornamental. The keeping a country in such beautiful order as Germany exhibits, has a wise practical side to it, too, for it keeps thousands of people in work and bread who would otherwise be idle and mischievous.

  As the night shut down, the captain wanted to tie up, but I thought maybe we might make Hirschhorn, so we went on. Presently the sky became overcast, and the captain came aft looking uneasy. He cast his eye aloft, then shook his head, and said it was coming on to blow. My party wanted to land at once,—therefore I wanted to go on. The captain said we ought to shorten sail, anyway, out of common prudence. Consequently the larboard watch was ordered to lay in his pole. It grew quite dark, now, and the wind began to rise. It wailed through the swaying branches of the trees, and swept our decks in fitful gusts. Things were taking on an ugly look. The captain shouted to the steersman on the forward log,—