Schiller's 'Glocke' — Mangan's bell : mediating German culture in Ireland, 1835-1846

Abstract

The following essay is intended as a study of a particular case of cultural mediation between Germany and the British Isles in the nineteenth century. It focuses on the part played by James Clarence Mangan (1803—49), a remarkably prolific translator and interpreter, in bringing German literature to the attention of Irish readers during his time as a contributor to the Dublin University Magazine (henceforth: DUM). Together with the Edinburgh-based Blackwood's Magazine and its counterpart in London, Fraser's Magazine, the DUM was the foremost conduit for German literature into the British Isles in the Victorian era, and it was also exported to the United States of America. The concern of this chapter is not, however, with the international reception of the magazine, but with the resonances of Mangan's work within his immediate environment, the city of Dublin in the two decades prior to the Great Famine of 1845—49. This concern informs our task: that of evoking Mangan as a translator and Dublin as a 'city in translation', a site where translators were engaged in appropriating exogenous ideas and materials and in disclosing the Gaelic cultural substratum.