Paradise lost translations1/20/2024 ![]() ![]() ![]() His chief argument was that Milton’s poetry violated the principle of Wahrscheinlichkeit or “verisimilitude,” meaning Milton not only depicted many events in poor taste, but certain actions and characters were simply too far-fetched to be convincing. He, together with his colleague at the University of Zürich, Johann Jakob Breitinger, had been engaged in a debate with Johann Christoph Gottsched, the Professor of Philosophy at Leipzig who recycled Voltaire’s critiques of 1728 and bolstered them with the rationalist poetics. From 1732 to 1780, Bodmer published no less than six different German translations of the epic. It can be said without exaggeration that the German-Swiss writer’s life’s work was the translation, defense and dissemination of Milton’s Paradise Lost for the first time among a wide German readership. It was largely due to the Olympian efforts of Bodmer, Milton’s chief apologist in Europe, that Paradise Lost was at last salvaged from these attacks. In his Essai sur la poésie épique (1728), Voltaire wrote of Paradise Lost ’s war in heaven: “The most judicious critics have found in this section no taste, likelihood or reason.” In other words: The work for which Milton has now won the utmost of artistic recognition was at first the object of religious censorship as much as secular disdain. To Voltaire, Milton’s “sublimity” was so much hot air. īut it was not only Lutheran authorities in Prussia and the Reformed magisterium in Switzerland who took offense at Milton’s epic: Lumières of the French Enlightenment also found reason to sneer. It had been banned in Germany for treating so sacred a theme with the baroque gallantry of a medieval romance at the time, dressing Genesis in Homeric clothe was scarcely better than re-writing the gospel story in the style of Rambo today. Branded “allzu romantisch” (“too romantic” in German), the epic first had to be smuggled past Friedrich Wilhelm’s pietist censors. When Johann Jakob Bodmer translated John Milton’s Paradise Lost into German in 1732, the biblical epic plummeted into a fiery abyss.
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