Translating the Hero: Mediums of Translation in Friedrich Klopstock’s Messias

As Friedrich Klopstock presented the plans for his epic the Messias in 1745, he expressed one of his main goals: to create an epic surpassing all predecessors in a meter and a tongue that would raise the German language to a higher literary status. 1 Among all of his predecessors whom he admired-Homer, Virgil, and Tasso-he most admired John Milton for his religious yet sublime epic Paradise Lost.Klopstock was drawn to Paradise Lost's sublimity and creativity when he read Johann Jakob Bodmer's German translation.2 Following Milton's example and the theoretical writings of the Swiss duo Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger, Klopstock created in his first poetic work a world filled with imagined celestial figures, religious themes, and heroic actions.In the Messias, Klopstock mixed sublimity with his own unorthodox exegetical presentation of Christianity.This mixture of religious and literary unorthodoxy evoked manifold associations with other religious writings and movements such as the Luther Bible and eighteenth-century pietistic sentimental culture because of their shared basis in liberal interpretations of the Bible (Kohl 134).Since Klopstock's exegesis was not always orthodox yet was similar to contemporary religious movements, it provided abundant fodder for theological debate (Kohl 134).When the first three books of the Messias were published in 1748, Bodmer and Breitinger immediately praised the new German poet for his literary unorthodoxy and compared his imaginative text with the imaginary and marvelous qualities of Paradise Lost.The Messias became Bodmer and Breitinger's paradigm of the Wunderbare (the marvelous) in poetry in their literary debate with 1 See Klopstock's valedictory speech (Abschiedsrede) from Schulpforta, "Declamatio, qua poetas epopoeiae auctores."Klopstock.Er; und über ihn.Erster Theil 1724-1747.Ed.Carl Friedrich Cramer.Hamburg, 1780.54-98 (German translation), 99-132 (Latin original).2 By 1745 Bodmer had produced two editions of his translation of Paradise Lost (he would eventually publish six different editions): Johann Miltons Verlust des Paradieses.Ein Helden-Gedicht (1732) and Johann Miltons Episches Gedichte von dem verlohrnen Paradiese (1742).It is unknown with which edition Klopstock was familiar, if not with both (Bender 5-6, 20).