Tristan und Isolde

The writer, literary historian and forty-eighter Hermann Kurz prepared the first complete translation of Tristan – but less as a contribution to German mediaeval studies than as part of the construction of a 19th-century literary tradition: “The Tristan saga is the social novel of the Middle Ages…” Basing his work on Immermann’s Tristan fragment (1841), Kurz added his own conclusion, which may be considered his major literary work. To enable a synoptic reading, the translation was set in the format of the long-lived edition by Hans Ferdinand Maßmann (1843). Admirers, artists and scholars, including Richard Wagner, came to know the epic through this process, so that Kurz’s edition is not only a significant milestone in the history of translation and of the subject, but had an independent influence which has long been overlooked.