Some weeks ago I taught Bram Stoker and Irish Gothic to a small group of students at UFRN in North-East Brazil. As apart from the lively confirmation of the universal popularity of that novel, and its curious character as a piece of second-rate writing (ha!) which goes to the heart of the modern neurosis on various fronts - sexual, alimentary, colonial, and so on - the class threw up a new interest in the actual language of the novel and especially its system of allusions .. among which the line expressly quoted from Gustave August Burger’s 1773 ballad “Lenore” is the most striking: “Denn die todten rieden schnell” - which Stoker immediately translates in a parenthesis as “the the dead travel fast”.

In this he has substituted “travel” for the usual translation-terms “ride, gallop” and so on. In seeking where he got his translation - assuming that he did not merely think it up - I first explored the translation-history of the original into English and came up with such writers as William Whewell and Dante Gabriel Rossetti both of whose versions are routine reproduced on websites dedicated to Stoker’s Dracula and all of its materials and themes. Yet neither of these include the word “travel” and the only indication of an alternative source was - enchantingly, it must be said - Charles Dickens’ famous “A Christmas Carol” in which Scrooge asks of Marley’s ghost, “You travel fast?” (The dialogue is cited on the Wikipedia page for Bürger’s “Lenore”.)

Could it be that Stoker was echoing Dickens in a story that he must have known and which, indeed, might well have been staged in a production he had seen? Stoker was a theatrical manager and knew a great deal of the contemporary drama scene, especially the popular diet since he was, after all, the manager of a popular theatre with the opposite of a fastidious taste for high-class literature - as Flann O’Brien facetiously calls the more intellectually demanding kind. It was then that I loaded up my trivial researches on Facebook with a query about the proximate source of Stoker’s word “travel”. And then came back the results ...

.. in the form of Neil Mann’s treasure-house of information about the exploitation of Bürger’s line in various European contexts - notably its rendering in French as “les mort vont vite” by Madame de Stael - a version that went, well, viral at the time. And then, Eureka! Neil throws in a reference to The Corsican Brothers of Dion Boucicault staged in 1852 - itself based on a novel by Dumas about Siamese twins - in which Farbbyang says, “The dead travel fast”. So, then, Boucicault - an Anglo-Irishman from Dublin and an older contemporary of Stoker who topped the British and American bill with his rumbuctious melodramas was the first to translate Burger’s “rieden” as “travel”. Or so it seems. Yet Dickens’s “Christmas Carol” (1843) had already celebrated its tenth birthday when Boucicault pasted together his show and it is unlikely that he had not met the Scrooge-Marley dialogue, just as Stoker may have known it independently of the Corsican debâcle.

On further searching, it turns out that Neil’s independent research is amply warranted by Catherine Wynne’s condensed account of the Boucicault-Stoker connection which also identifies the Punch review he mentiones - in which the one about the line of mortal transport is cited as the only good one in the play. (Wynne doesn’t find it necessary to make the connection with Burger’s ballad as cited in the text of Dracula, however.)

So where does that leave us? It is certainly possible to construct a fashionable interpretation in which the colonial remainder - as some philosopher has called it - is shown infusing a constant amount of “Irish-Gothic” into the blood-streams of Boucicault and Stoker, with similar arrangements made for Le Fanu and Maturin and anyone else who falls within the shock-waves of postcolonial criticism. In such a view, Dracula appears to be first and foremost a product of the Anglo-Irish literary tradition considered as an insular (and insulated) literary growth.

There is much to dispute this, not least the fact that Stoker was a middle-class Irish protestant and not a demon-landlord of any kind. More tellingly, however, if his source for the Burger translation - as I will call it for short - is Dickens rather than Boucicault, or both together, he is just another British chap writing horror stories for the Victorian stage in London, Dublin, Philadelphia or wherever an audience for that sort of thing can be found. It is true that the death travel quick but not as quick, it seems, as a good literary line - and that has been the case with Gustav August Burger’s ‘denn der todten rieden schnell which seemed, for much of two centuries, to be as unkillable as Dracula himself.

 Engravings on the theme of “Lenore” by Johann David Schubert and Frank Kirchbach [L & R respectively].

The first chapter of Dracula contains a quotation from the macabre and once-popular ballad “Lenore” published by Gottfried August Bürger in 1773 - one among many other literary references to Shakespeare, Byron, Walter Scott and sundry scientific writers, named and unnamed, which imbue that horror-story with a surprisingly literary character. (For some sense of the range of allusions in the novel, it is worth visiting the extraordinary Bookmarks page compiled by Victoria Hooper on Bookdrum - online.) The passage in question describes Dracula’s first appearance in the novel as an anonymous - and ominous - presence. This is how it goes:

It appears that the passenger who quotes Bürger here is harping on the narrative of the famous ballad in which a young woman pining for her lost beloved, a soldier who went off to war and has not returned, is visited by a horseman in his likeness who promises to take her to their bridal bed but who is actually Death who takes her on a whirlwind ride across intervening lands and seas to the graveyard where his bones lie and invites her to join them in the grave. (She dies but her soul ascends to heaven because she begs forgiveness the sin of despair in God’s redemptive power.) It is speech near the end of the poem where the horseman sheds the similitude of William and reveals his true character as Death which the passenger quotes - meaning to suggest that the faceless coachman in the calèche - as distinct from the driver of their own work-a-day post-chase - has the aspect of the Grim Reaper:

The effect is very much that of a ghost-story - or a vampire tale - in which a deathly figures leads his victims out of the world. It is also reminiscent of the carriage-ride with which Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla begins. Nor would thoughts about Emily Dickinson’s poem on Death as a coachman be entirely out of place. In fact Bürger’s poem was written in response to Johann Gottfried Herder’s call for a national German literature reflecting the vernacular potential which he detected in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and the MacPherson’s Ossian poems (The Works of Ossian, 1765) and, indeed, Burger made it clear that his ballad was equally based on a German folk-tale and on the Scottish ballad “Sweet William’s Ghost” which Percy had printed in his collection. All of this was part of the rising tide of European Romanticism but also the new interest in spooky stories as the stuff of polite literature.

Stoker clearly knows the German ballad in the original since he quotes it in that language, yet English translations had been going the rounds since William Taylor published his to great acclaim in the Monthly Review in March 1796 (though written and circulated in manuscript six years earlier). Taylor’s version might seem a likely candidate for the epithet ‘travel’ in the translated line from Bürger’s ballad - but alas, no. That translation is reprinted in The Broadway Anthology of Romantic Poetry (2016) and contains the following lines: ‘Tramp, tramp, across the land they speede; / Splash, splash, across the sea; / “Hurrah! the dead can ride apace; Dost fear to ride with mee?”’ (ll.189-93; see online.) Sadly the Google Books version of the anthology breaks off here, but the point is adequately made that Taylor is a rider rather than a traveller - a notion for which Charles Dickens may have supplied the surprising source, as I note below.

Other translators who left into the rign in 1796 were J. T. Stanley and H. J. Pye and W. R. Spencer, while Walter Scott made a version with a different title - “William and Helen” which is nevertheless pure translation. We know that he heard the poem being read in an Edinburgh drawing-room and was sufficiently impressed to seek out the manuscript in Germany and to translate it in one day in 1794. Yet another translation was made by a very precocious Dante Gabriel Rossetti at the age of 16, in 1844, of which these are the relevant lines:

It is worth glancing here at Sir Walter Scott’s treatment of the speedy travel motif in his quatrains:

In these he is reproducing the Death’s repeated refrain in the original as he approaches the would-be ‘bridal bed’. The version I have quoted first above is the one made by William Whewell in circa 1817 and published anonymously in a pamphlet publication of 1829, and afterwards in Verse Translations from the German including Bürger’s “Lenore” [and] Arthur Schiller’s “Song of the Bell” and Other Poems (1847) - a copy of which is available at Bookdrum [online]. (Regarding the identity of the author of that book and its date of composition, see infra.)

Clearly none of these - Whewell, Scott or Rossetti - are the source of the succinct translation which Stoker places in parenthesis after the German original that serves to convey the (presumably German-speaking) passenger’s intuition about the ghastly identity of the mysterious aristocratic coachman. What stands perhaps out in Stoker’s rendering is the word ‘travel’ for Reiten [lit. ‘ride’] and this does not appear to come from any previous English version. Similarly his rendering of schnell as ‘fast’ has an appreciable blunt force. Who the editor is who adds that translation to the text, it recks not to ask - but certainly not Jonathan Harker in whose journal it appears.

That Bürger’s poem and English translations of it influenced the English Romantics is well established; Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth all mention William Taylor’s version in their letters to each other after its appearance in the Monthly Magazine in May 1796 [see note]. Wordsworth even held that version to be superior to the German, though Coleridge characteristically did not agree. The several complex transactions surrounding those translation were brilliantly appraised by Oliver Farrar Emerson in English Translations of Burger’s Lenore - A Study in English and German Romanticism (Cleveland, Ohio: Western Reserve UP 1915), the chief source of my information on the subject [available at Internet Archive - online].

A similar deposition has been made by Marti Lee who claims that that ‘Lenore had a tremendous influence on the literature of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries, and in fact, today’s popular horror books and movies are still feeling the reverberations.’ He goes on:

In short, Bürger’s achievement, while minor in itself, helped father an international movement that led directly to the massive popularity of Gothic works then and now. [...] As the Gothic novel borrowed many of its original conventions from the German ballads, as popularized by “Lenore”, we can fairly say that Bürger is one of the most influential founding fathers of the Gothic and horror genres.

(Lee, Marti, ‘The Germanic Invasion: Bürger’s Ballads And their Influence on English writers’, Georgian Southern University - online (unavailable at 02.10.2017), cited in the Wikipedia article on “Lenore” - online; accessed 02.10.2017; see bibliographical list as infra.)

This seems to apply well to Stoker’s Dracula in which the novelist not alone echoes the theme of the deadly abduction but also incorporates an explicit allusion to Burger with an utterly apposite quotatioin thrown away in conversational mode by the entirely admirable wit of German extraction on the inside of the Transylvanian public carriage. It oddity is that Stoker not only borrows the line but also mentions the author - much as he mentions Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso in the course of Van Helsing’s diagnosis of Count Dracula’s ontological problems in terms of the criminal type and the recidivist tendencies of his ‘child brain’. It is an odd habit on Stoker’s part and one that reveals him as something of an intellectual show-off and, of course, a determined practicioner of the Irish art of fiction which, as in the case of his compatriot James Joyce, is guaranteed to keep the professors busy for centuries.

Stoker’s fascination with the line from Bürger - no throwaway reference, therefore - is demonstrated by its recurrent in “Dracula’s Guest”, a later short-story in the form of a narrative told by Jonathan Harker who writes: ‘On top of the tomb, seemingly driven through the solid marble - for the structure was composed of a few vast blocks of stone - was a great iron spike or stake. On going to the back I saw, graven in great Russian letters: “The Dead Travel Fast”’. In this rendering, the English version of the phrase which is offered as a parenthetical translation in Dracula features as the original even to the extent that the little story omits to say whether the “Russian letters” are used to transcribe the English or the Russian version - or perhaps, more logically, the German original which Stoker has omitted to mention on this occasion, as he also fails to mention the poet who first wrote the phrase that reverberates so noisily in his vampire writings.

According to one website, source, in later life Bürger was dismissed by Franz Schiller who had the monopoly of literary fame in German, and died alone and ignored on 8 June 1797, and ‘and would probably now be completely forgotten if it were not for Bram Stoker.’ (‘“Denn die Todten reiten schnell” - Its Meaning and Origin’, at Hubpages, 14 Dec. 2013 - online; accessed 02.10.2017.) On that website the original couplet is given as, ‘Sieh hin, sieh her! der Mond-scheint hell. / Wir und die Todten reiten schnell.’ - with a variant quotation from Rossetti’s translation from the one I have given above. Thus:

These are actually earlier lines in the poem - ll.132-32 - as consultation with the Rossetti Archive at Harvard will show - while the lines that correspond to Burger’s original phrase occur repeatedly at ll.157-59, 189-91, as show [above]. (It is rather oddly the case that Rossetti’s translation is most often quoted in illustration of Burger’s original on English-language websites - as for instance the Dracula page of Infocult: Uncanny Informatics [online; accessed 02.10.2017.]

Finally, as the Wikipedia article on “Lenore” reminds us, the following dialogue occurs between Scrooge and Marley in “A Christmas Carol”: ‘“You travel fast?” said Scrooge. “On the wings of the wind,” replied the Ghost.’ It would seem, then, that the penultimate verse from Bürger’s “Leonore” is like a klaxen note to be heard in numerous English romantic tales - a notice of the presence of death-in-life and life-in-death which is the very stuff of the supernatural tale and which, indeed, even extends into the liminal conclusion of Joyce’s great short story “The Dead”, though with the help of Bürger’s phrase. It may in fact be that Dickens is the immediate source for the translation-term ‘travel’ for reiten in the original since we have not been able to find it in any other translation. If so, Jacob Marley and Count Dracula have formed an unlikely joint-stock company in the world of English literature - or perhaps not so unlikely after all!

BS 02.02.2017

What follows are extracts from William Whewell’s translation of Bürger’s ballad - here called “Leonore”. (Taylor called her “Ellenore” and Rossetti actively grumbled about the inappropriate redaction of her name as an Italianate “Leonara”.) Whewell’s version has been supplied by Victoria Hooper in her superlative Dracula annotations at Bookdrum [online] - or, rather, framed in one of those clever boxes which supply scrolling pages of Google and Microsoft’s Internet Archive text for our delectation. (Mem., Must remember to purloin this device for Ricorso!)

On the date of authorship and date of composition of Whewell’s translation, see infra.

[...]

[...]

Taken in conjunction with an ink-stroke in the table of contents against the title of “Leonore” - as the poem is here called (the standard English version of the name which was pointedly rejected by others including Rossetti), this seems to suggest that the date of composition as determined by Isaac Todhunter in his life of Whewell was 1817 (Vol. 1, p.374 as cited here).

In 1876, a certain Isaac Todhunter published a two-volume study of the writings of Dr. William Whewell, the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge - a famous literary don. in it he conducted some detective work on the authorship of the volume in which the English translation of Burger’s macabre ballad “Lenore” first appeared. There he writes:

In the early part of 1847, a volume appeared anonymously entitled Verse Translations from the German: including Bürger’s Lenore, Schiller’s Song of the Bell, and other Poems. The volume was published in London by John Murray; it is in octavo. The translations and the notes occupy 87 pages; the title, preface and lists of contents occupy 8 pages. The preface is peculiar on this account; two paragraphs take an impersonal form, and then the writer proceeds to say, “I have added ...”, while no name is subscribed. The authorship of this volume is known from Dr Whewell’s correspondence. (p.166)

In 1858 a litle book appeared, entitled Two Verse Translations of Burger’s Lenore; it was published at Cambridge by Macmillan and Co. It consists of 39 pages. In the preface the first paragraph of the preface to the Verse Translations .. of 1847 is repeated. The original German is give with two translations; that on the left-hand pags is the same as in the Verse Translations, and is therefore by Dr. Whewell. (p.222)

It appears that the Coignard Frères have deviated massively from the plot of Bürger’s ballad in supplying an entire social milieu for Lenore’s love and loss - and in finally bring her beloved back to her by means of the device of a mislaid letters: “O! que je suis heureuse!” This may be the worst perversion of a good noir story in existence and a complete betrayal of the spirit of Gothic and the Romantic movement as whole - or, rather, a ruinous exchange which replaces full-blown European Romanticism with sentimentalism of the cheapest music-hall French kind. It is hard to find words to described the vulgarity of this theatrical fiasco - though perhaps the brothers had it in mind to put all to right for poor Lenore ... Thank goodness the Germans had the backbone to show the French the real meaning of multiculturalism five years later! [BS 3 Oct. 2017.]

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Although many of Irving’s melodramas retain their anachronistic qualities, their language, as we have seen, suffuses Stoker’s fictions. In October 1880, Punch records that the best and only line of merit in Boucicault’s The Corsican Brothers is, “The Dead Travel Fast” (Anon., 1880, p.149). The line recurs in relation to the vampire in the early chapters of Stoker’s text when one of Harker’s companions on the coach to Bukovina sees the Count arrive for Harker. (Stoker, Dracula, 1997, p.17.) [...]’