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Journal of Sociolinguistics 4/4, 2000: 588613

Translating African-American
Vernacular English into German:
The problem of `Jim' in Mark Twain's
Huckleberry Finn1
Raphael Berthele
University of Fribourg, Switzerland
This paper focuses on the most important problem translators are faced with
when translating Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn into German: how can the
speech of the African-American character Jim be rendered? When translating
Jim's passages substantial problems arise because there is no exact German
equivalent of AAVE. This paper examines both orthographic and other linguistic strategies to dierentiate Jim's voice over the last hundred years. This
historical analysis shows that in most translations before the 1960s, these
strategies downgrade Jim's linguistic and cognitive faculties, depicting his
speech as a grammatically simplied pidgin. More contemporary translations,
however, opt for devices that depict Jim in colloquial and spoken language that
does not carry the same amount of sociolinguistic stigma. Thus, changing
translation techniques shed light on prevailing attitudes toward non-standard
varieties of both German and English.

KEYWORDS: Orthography, AAVE, German translation, literary dialect,

translation history

INTRODUCTION
The fundamental intent of every literary translation is to strive for maximum
equivalence of source text and target text (Catford 1974: 27). However,
translation theory is still grappling with how to dene `equivalence' (Wilss
1980: 156.) or `authenticity' (Meid 1993: 449) towards the original text on
both the denotational and connotational levels. Probably one of the most dicult
tasks for a literary translator is to nd target-language equivalents for dialectal or
sociolectal speech in the source text. This kind of translation engages the
translator's understanding of the complex set of sociolinguistic relationships
between varieties in both the source and the target language. These include:
1. the sociolinguistic relationship of standard and non-standard sourcelanguage varieties;
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2. the author's ideas about 1;

3. the author's attempt to render 1 in the literary text and his/her purpose and
intentions for the use of non-standard varieties;
4. the sociolinguistic relationship of standard and non-standard target-language varieties;
5. the translator's ideas about 1, 2 and 3;
6. the translator's attempt to render 1 (or what s/he thinks to be 1) in the
target language, based on the translator's understandings of 4.
In this paper, I explore these issues and relationships through the analysis of
German translations of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with a
particular emphasis on the way that non-standard orthography is used in the
German versions to render Twain's representation of an American sociolinguistic reality. My specic focus will be on the way the speech of the
African-American character `Jim' is translated.
Huckleberry Finn is a particularly rich text to study from this perspective,
because of the large number of German translations in its more-than-100-year
history. The very number of translations is in itself convincing evidence for the
exemplary status this novel has in the German-speaking world. For the German
reader, this book was an important contribution to the construction of a very
specic image of America in which the issue of Black-White cultural and
linguistic relations no doubt played a signicant role. That is, the status of
African Americans and their speech constituted a signicant form of cultural
`otherness' through which Germanophones explored their own culture. These
translations can thus be viewed as cultural positionings vis-a-vis that otherness.
In their eort to reproduce the sociolinguistic setting in Twain's ctional
world, translators attempt to re-create in German what they believe to be a
faithful mirror of relationships 1, 2 and 3 (above). The sociolinguistic analysis of
these translations thus reveals the translators' positions on the meaning of
sociolinguistic dierences, both for the historical society represented in the
novel, as well as for the German-speaking society for whom they translated.
They also reect translators' assessments of Twain's perspective on the value of
the speech of the African-American characters he portrayed.
Literary dialects as strategies of authenticity
Twain's dialect writings are part of an important literary dialect tradition in the
U.S. As Sumner Ives says, `nearly all examples of literary dialect are deliberately
incomplete; the author is an artist, not a linguist or a sociologist, and his
purpose is literary rather than scientic' (Ives 1971: 147). One classic literary/
artistic purpose of using dialect writing is to establish `authenticity' of persons,
historical and geographical settings. In his preface to Huckleberry Finn, Twain
writes: `The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but pains-takingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of
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personal familiarity with these several forms of speech' (Twain [1884] 1988:
lvii). In other words, he identies his dialect use as a deliberate choice motivated
by the goal of literary realism. The authenticity of his regionally rooted Missouri
characters is created and explicitly signaled by written representations of
how they `really' speak.
According to contemporary reviews (Hutchinson 1993: 122), these eorts
were considered successful. Holton's assessment `Mark Twain's representation
of Jim's dialect is certainly extremely well done' (1984: 88) is representative of
many modern evaluations of this aspect of Twain's work. Considerable work
has already been done to locate the dialects in Twain's book (cf. Roulon 1967;
Carkeet 1979; Fisher Fishkin 1993; Southard/Muller 1993), and there is no
consensus about the number of distinguishable dialects in Huckleberry Finn. For
the purposes of this discussion, I will leave aside the question of how accurately
Twain's literary dialect represented 1840 AAVE in Missouri. The important and
undisputed fact is that there is a big dierence between the dialect of black and
white people in Twain's novel.2
The relativity of sociolinguistic prestige
It is possible that what Preston writes about folkloric transcriptions that almost
every respelling (non-standard spelling) makes the reader `feel to be critical of the
speaker' (1982: 322) also applies to literature such as the novel in the scope of
this paper. This is because respellings are a cue for dialectal variation, and
dialectal variation is almost invariably linked to social hierarchy and dierentiation which relegates those who do not speak `the standard' to a lower position.
Yet the meanings of dialectal variation are not limited to the opposition
between `high' and `low' prestige, because dialectal variation is also sociolinguistically linked to other sources of social value than `prestige'. Not only can
non-standard dialects have in-group value (`covert prestige' Trudgill 1972,
1983: 85), but they also obtain value relative to other non-standard forms and
their speakers. In opposition to the `standard', non-standard speech can also
have positive moral connotations, establishing the speaker as `natural', sincere,
without artice. Seen from a normative point of view, almost none of the
characters in Twain's text speak a `pure' prestige variety. I take the position,
therefore, that to understand the meaning of non-standard spellings in a literary
text in general, and in particular, the sociolinguistic meaning of the major
strategies of translating Jim's speech, one must consider them in relation to:
1. the speech of the other characters in the novel;
2. the history of the use of sociolectal, dialectal and stylistic variation in
German literature;
3. editor's or translator's comments in prefaces, afterwords and blurbs;
4. passages in translators' manuals that deal with the translation of dialects,
sociolects or ethnolects.
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Rather than attributing absolute values to literary non-standard language,

we have to apply a exible evaluation of the relation between a standard or
quasi-standard (in a specic literary text, in a literary genre, in parts of the
German literary tradition) and deviations from the standard. This standard does
not necessarily have to be the standard language, however it is certainly the
case that the more or less codied standard language is the central point of
reference.
The translation data
Twain's book was published in 1884. The rst German edition I could nd dates
from 1890 and was translated by Henny Koch. This text was very successful
and often reprinted without major changes until the 1940s. Later in the
20th century new translations or editions of Huckleberry Finn were published
almost every year by many dierent publishers in Germany, Austria and
Switzerland. Some of these translations (for example, the one by Marie Schloss)
have been re-edited several times over a long time span, others did not make it
to a second edition. During my investigation I collected about 40 German
editions by almost 30 translators. Roughly 20 of these translators were
identiable and about 10 translators' names are not mentioned at all. The
data I present in the following stem from a selection of 13 translations which I
have selected at more or less regular intervals over the last 100 years.3
To assess the linguistic features used by the translators, I chose a longer
passage (749 words, 6 paragraphs) in chapter 8, shortly after the meeting of
Huckleberry Finn and Jim on an island near St. Petersburg, where Jim tells
Huck how he ran away from his slave-owners (see appendix for Twain's original
text). This passage was chosen because it is the rst (and probably the longest)
continuous stretch of Jim's direct speech.
The linguistic representations found in the 13 translations can be separated
into two broad categories: orthographic features and features above the level of
spelling. The categories in the orthographic section are very much inspired by
those proposed by Preston (1982: 325). In contrast to Preston's corpus (of
academic folklore texts), however, orthographic features are used only in very
few cases to render regional variation. Below, I summarize the key features of
translators' representations of Jim's speech:
1. Orthographic features:
a. sound/syllable loss;
b. reanalysis (change of spelling on the basis of auditory analysis of spoken
language);
c. modication (the written counterpart of coarticulation and assimilation);
d. eye dialect (violation of standard spelling without eect on pronunciation);
e. idiosyncrasies and spelling mistakes.
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2. Features above the level of spelling:

a. stylistic variation in the lexicon: use of colloquial and regional words;
b. morpho-syntactic features: violations of Standard High German;
c. syntactic features: violations of standard grammar and representation of
regional dialectal features;
d. modications of Jim's speech: replacement with indirect speech; partial
or full omission.
While many of these features are used to translate non-African-American
characters' dialects, in almost all German translations African-American characters can easily be distinguished from others. The African-American characters
either exhibit dierent linguistic features or they show a considerably higher
density of certain features. This is consistent with Roulon's analysis of Twain's
original text, in which he nds only two distinct dialects: a mixture of Caucasian
(South) Midland and Southern speech on the one hand, and a mixture of Negro
(South) Midland and Southern speech on the other hand (Roulon 1971: 219).
In the analysis below, I enumerate the devices used by translators in the
Twain corpus, and also describe how similar devices were/are used in German
literature. Based on this comparison and contrast, I go on to divide the main
features found in the German texts into two categories: those which establish
dierence that is, dene Jim as a character who speaks dierently from most
other characters and those which establish decit that is, represent Jim as as
socially, linguistically and even cognitively decient.
NON-STANDARD SPELLING
Sound/syllable loss
This category includes all cases of sound loss on the syllabic level or below, as
they occur in some dialects/sociolects, in fast speech (allegro forms) or in more
informal style. In the original text, Twain makes extensive use of this device (cf.
appendix, 7: 'spec to steal a skift 'long de sho') and it is of course probable that the
German translations which use this feature as well were inspired by the English
text. The use of the loss-device is by far the most frequent orthographic strategy
in the German texts examined here.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Jim4
n Niggerhandlah (Harranth)
kriegen-n (Koch)
Kuferladn (Harranth)
isnich (Harranth)
auf 'm (Rathjen)

Standard High German

ein Niggerhandler
kriegen ihn
Kuferladen
ist nicht
auf dem

English
a nigger trader
get him
cooper shop
is not
on the

In example 3 the syncopation is quite normal in spoken SHG (Standard High

German), therefore this example could be attributed to the category `eye dialect'
(see below).
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In German literary texts, there is quite a long tradition of rendering sound loss
through spelling. The following two brief examples illustrate my more general
observation that in German-language literature, the use of the loss device
generally characterizes spoken language and colloquial style, and is often (but
not categorically) used for the speech of persons belonging to lower social
classes. Examples 612 are taken from Theodor Fontane's novel Stine, and show
how loss is typically used in realistic literature to represent spoken language
(the examples are all from direct speech uttered in rather informal contexts):
Tokens from the speech of `Lierschen', a lower-class woman (Fontane [1890] 1973a: 175):
SHG
English
6. nich
nicht
not
7. un
und
and
8. is
ist
is
9. Sep'ratschlussel Separatschlussel reserve key
10. grad
gerade
just
Tokens from the speech of `the Count' (Fontane [1890] 1973a: 208):
11. hab
habe
have
12. wie's
wie es
how it

Fontane's novel is set in the Berlin of the late 19th century, and the lowerclass characters show typical features of the local urban vernacular. While
sound loss is used in the examples above to represent the speech of both low and
high-status characters, there are some dierences in the salience of the losses
marked for the person of lower social rank. Examples 11 and 12 in the count's
speech stand for quite conventional and stylistically almost unmarked phenomena such as the apocope of the unstressed 5-e4 and the clitization of the
pronoun `es'. In contrast, the loss of the nal consonant of `nicht' and `und' in
the woman's speech (examples 6 and 7) are less conventional and therefore,
more salient indices of colloquial, `sloppy' and uneducated pronunciation.
In the translation corpus, we see that the apostrophe as a means to indicate
sound loss5 is used to a very varying extent. Many translators do not set the
apostrophe every time sound loss occurs, as Table 1 shows clearly. If sound loss
is frequent in a certain text it can give the type a very unusual appearance, as in
the case of the recent translation by Rathjen:
Table 1: Sound loss in two translations
Harranth
is
s
n
nich
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Rathjen

SHG

English

is'
's
'n
nich'

ist
es
ein
nicht

is
it
a (indef. art.)
not

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13. Na ja, weisst, is' so 'elaufen. Die olle Missus 'ch mein Miss Watson die hackt 'n
daue'nd auf mir rum un' 'ehand' 'lt mich ziem 'ich gropp, a 'er hat imme' 'esagt,
dasse mich nie runter nach Orleans v'scherbeln wurd. A 'er 'ch hab 'emerkt, da wa'
'n Niggerhan'ler inner Geg'nd am Rumtreib'n neu'ich, und wird mir langsam
mulmich. (Rathjen, see appendix, 13)

Rathjen makes an extensive use of the loss device, indicating each `loss' with
an apostrophe. This extensive use of sound loss makes Jim's account barely
legible the reader almost has to read the passage aloud in order to understand
it. Signicantly, the consonantal losses (a'er for `aber', 'elaufen for `gelaufen',
'ehandelt for `behandelt' etc.) are not reminiscent of fast, colloquial speech or of
any other variety of German and I could not nd any German literary texts
which make a comparably striking and unconventional use of loss. The density
and rather strange use of orthographic devices here actually generates a very
articial variety, both from the graphical and from the (presumed) acoustic
point of view.
By way of comparison, the passage quoted above appears in Harranth's
translation as follows:
14. Nu, siehsdu, s kam so: Die alte Missus wo Missus Watson is immah hacktsie auf
mir rum und nimmt mich machtich hart ran, hat abah auch immah gesagt, sie
verkauft mich nich nach Orleans runter. Nu seh ich abah schon die langste Zeit n
Niggerhandlah in unsre Gegend, und da hab ich angefangt mit Angst kriegn.
(Harranth, see appendix, 13)

In Harranth's text, the loss device is applied in a more modest way and is not
marked with an apostrophe, which makes his text more legible and uent.
Overall, we can see that while sound loss has been used from the early German
translations onwards, its frequency and salience increases in the more recent
translations.
Reanalysis
Preston (1982: 325) distinguishes between three forms of reanalysis: metathesis (pert' for `pretty'), clitization (kinda) and phrasal groups (godamighty).
Metathesis is quite frequent in Twain's original text (e.g. appendix, 2: awluz).
I did not, however, nd any examples of clitization that go beyond the standard
forms (dey'd'), and there are also no phrasal groups. In the German translation
corpus there are no cases of metathesis, but there are a few tokens representing
respelled phrasal groups (cf. ex. 19, 20). Clitization (ex. 1518) however is quite
frequent in the more recent texts, as the following examples show:
15.
16.
17.
18.

Jim
sagich (Harranth)
hamse (Rathjen)
mit'm (Rathjen)
inner (Rathjen, Harranth)

SHG
sag(e) ich
haben sie
mit dem
in der

English
I say
they have
with the
in the
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TRANSLATING AAVE INTO GERMAN

19. habichmich (Harranth)
20. konnsiesich (Harranth)

595

habe ich mich I have myself

konnen sie sich they can themselves

We can nd some rare examples of reanalysis in the rst German translation

by Koch:
21. Denken er, wenn Jim gehen zu Fuss, kriegen-n [kriegen ihn/get him] die Hunde,
wenn er stehlen Schi, kriegen-n die Menschen, er mussen haben Floss, Floss sein
gut, lassen keine Spur hinter sich. (Koch, see appendix, 19)

However, this feature has not been used frequently in the years since Koch's
translation (cf. Figure 1 below). In Schonfeldt's text I found only one token (solls
= `soll es') and it is only with the recent attempts by Harranth and Rathjen that
reanalysis is used more frequently and for more interesting purposes:
22.
23.
24.
25.

Harranth
siehsdu
hacktsie
wos
vonnem

SHG
siehst du
hackt sie
wo es
von dem

English
you see (see app., 1)
she pecks (see app., 1)
where it (see app., 11)
of the (see app., 12)

Most clitization stands for stylistically unmarked allegro forms of spoken

German. In German literature, it rst appears with the realistic or naturalistic
authors, and is mainly used to render the speech of the lower classes. This is
illustrated by Theodor Fontane's work, where the many tokens of cliticized
forms are used to represent the speech of lower-class characters:
Fontane [1890] 1973a: p. 176.
SHG
English
26. kommste
kommst du
do you come
27. verstehste verstehst du do you understand
28. wenn's
wenn es
if it
29. fur'n
fur einen
for a

Modication
The category of `modication' in the corpus is visible in the orthographic
representation of coarticulation and assimilation. Very often modication
occurs together with sound loss or reanalysis (cf. Preston 1982: 325), and
the more frequent the depicted phonological processes are, the more modication results in eye-dialect-like orthographies. Although it is not always
possible to distinguish `standard' modications from `non-standard' ones,
some of the orthographically marked modications in both Twain's original
text and some of the translations index phonological deviation from the
standard pronunciation.
Modication is one of the characteristic features of Twain's spelling of the Jim
passages (cf. appendix): dey = `there'; er = `or'; mawnin = `morning'; doan' =
`don't'; dah = `there'. In the corpus of Twain translations, however, modication
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appears only in the latest texts. It is almost always combined with the
reanalysis/phrasal groups feature.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.

Jim
vonnem Mord (Harranth)
hamse (Rathjen)
weisste (Rathjen)
inner (Rathjen, Harranth)
gropp (Rathjen)

SHG
von dem Mord
haben sie
weisst du
in der
grob

English
of the murder
they have
you know
in the
coarse

As none of the German translations with the exception of Wurth opts for a
consequent dialect translation of Jim's passages, modication is not used for the
orthographic equivalent of phonetic dierences between German dialects. All
examples quoted above stand for colloquial, maybe quick but denitely nearstandard speech.
Looking again for models from German literature, we nd examples of
modication beginning with the realists. In Fontane (cited above), modication
is the third most frequently used orthographic strategy to characterize dialectal
speech or the speech of lower social classes (e.g. haste for `hast du' [you have]
and gehste for `gehst du' [you go] Fontane [1890] 1973a: 177f.).
Eye dialect
Just as in the English original (wuz = `was', Illinoi = 'Illinois', see appendix, 25),
the translator may use a device generally called `eye dialect': familiar words are
respelled in a way that violates orthographic norms but, in contrast to the
strategies mentioned so far, does not reveal any particularities of pronunciation,
style, dialect or sociolect. In this sense `eye dialect' really has `no signicance
whatever to the scientic student of speech' (Krapp 1971: 29). As an
orthographic deviation from the norm, however, eye dialect may well have
signicance for the sociolinguistic analysis of literary speech forms. Eye dialect
can be used to portray characters who are supposed to speak dierently (than
other characters, than the standard language) without really having them
speak dierently. The eect of dierence is limited to the graphic appearance of
the text. This dierence on the spelling surface may not a priori signify a
devaluation of a certain character but is nevertheless subject to sociolinguistic
reallocation. Examples of eye dialect in the translations are:
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.

Jim
abah (Harranth)
Ufah (Kruger)
machtich (Harranth)
mulmich (Rathjen)
wahten (Eger)
duh (Eger)
guht (Eger)

SHG
aber
Ufer
machtig
mulmig
waten
du
gut

English
but
bank of the river
mighty
uneasy
to wade
you
good
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These cases of eye dialect represent standard pronunciations of standard

spellings: 5er4 in nal position in SHG is pronounced [] (35, 36). The derivational morpheme {-ig} is pronounced [Ic] in SHG which can be rendered
perfectly well with the spelling 5-ich4 (ex. 37, 38). The 5h4-grapheme in ex.
3941 is a length-marker for the vowels [a:] in `waten' and the [u:] in `du' and `gut'.
I was not able to nd any comparable forms in German literature until the
beginning of the 20th century. In the (fortunately) almost unknown novel from
1918 Die Sunde wider das Blut by the German author Arthur Dinter ( [1918]
1921), the author uses many orthographic and grammatical strategies to
distinguish the Jewish characters from the other characters in the novel. One
of the features used is the transcription with 5ai4 of the German diphthong
[aI] for which the standard spelling is 5ei4:
42. Wie haisst [heisst/means] nicht maine [meine/my] Erndung? [. . .] Wenn ich kann
zahlen von mainem [meinem/my] Geld den Ernder und ihm kann abkaufen fur
bares Geld de Erndung, is das dann nicht maine [meine/my] Erndung? (Dinter
[1918] 1921: 50, italics in the original)

Because the 5ai4-graph is even closer to the standard pronunciation there

is clearly no phonological motivation for this spelling feature. In Dinter's case
we can be sure that he modied the spelling of the speech of Jewish characters in
order to portray them as speaking without `German' competence (Richter 1995:
289). The spelling modications are a reection of Dinter's racist sentiments:
that a Jew, even if his native language is German, will never be able to speak/
think/act as a `real' German.
The relatively late discovery of `eye dialect' in the German context may
explain the rather late appearance of this device in our translation corpus: the
rst translator who uses it is Eger in 1944, but the frequencies are scarcely
worth mentioning before the 1990s, in Harranth's and Rathjen's texts. In these
recent translations eye dialect functions to amplify the colloquial, spoken speech
style of a uneducated, socially inferior character.
Idiosyncrasies and spelling mistakes
It is obvious that all the spelling modications described above are violations of
standard orthography. Although most of the respellings seem to be more or less
motivated, some of them cannot be explained by the attempt to transcribe
stylistic, dialectal or sociolectal variation. Sometimes it is dicult to decide
whether they are intended by the translator or are simply due to bad typesetting:
43. Neulich ich aber sehen, dass Mann, was handelt mit Nigger, zu ihrr [ihr/her]
kommen. (Eger, see appendix, 3)

This respelling does not resemble any German variety; it may be the
translator's attempt to transcribe an idiosyncratic pronunciation feature in
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the highly decient learner language (see below) he assigns to Jim's character. It
is uncertain if this token is an intended violation of German spelling because all
the rest of Jim's narration is, as far as spelling is concerned, highly accurate.
Another rather enigmatic case is the use of the English spelling for the German
preposition fur:
44. Legen sich Jim in die Schilf for [fur/for] zum Warten. (Koch, see appendix, 14)

Again this respelling is an isolated case. In Koch's translation we come across

two obviously idiosyncratic respellings of wahrhaftig [`really'], namely warraftig
and warratig, but apart from that Koch makes use of orthographic devices only
for the transcription of sound loss. However, both Koch and Eger also use
something like a `Gastarbeiter-Deutsch' [guest worker German] on the grammatical level. This suggests that these respellings (however unsystematic) are
used to amplify the decit-character of Jim's speech (see section 3 for discussion
of grammar).
Misspellings are also used for foreign words. Transfer from English seems to be
the favorite object of this kind of orthographic originality:
45. Ladys (Harranth)
ladies
46. Schentlman (Harranth) gentlemen
47. Jenlmen (Rathjen)
gentlemen

I am not quite sure about the intended eect of this transfer from English.
Example 46 probably stands for German-accent pronunciations of the English
word; 47 could be motivated by the original spelling in Twain's text (`genlmen',
cf. appendix, 11). This transfer could be the attempt to introduce some elements
of the source language in the German text to remind the reader of the text's
origins. Alternatively, the misspellings could indicate a speaker who is not
cosmopolitan because he cannot pronounce foreign words properly.
In sum, clear-cut instances of spelling mistakes that mark their speakers as
linguistically decient are rare and haphazard in this corpus. Alone, they are
dicult to interpret; we have to see how they are used in conjunction with nonstandard elements above the orthographic level.
NON-STANDARD ELEMENTS ABOVE THE ORTHOGRAPHIC LEVEL
Lexical features
The category `colloquial words' does not need much further explanation: all
translators more or less frequently choose words that tend to be avoided in
careful speech. Examples are:
Standard spelling
48. zappeldustah (Harranth) zappelduster
49. stocknstr (Harranth)
stocknster
50. verdrucken (Schonfeldt)

English
pitch-dark
pitch-dark
to slip away
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51. absausen (Kruger)
52. verduften (Schonfeldt)
53. v'scherbeln (Rathjen)

verscherbeln

599
to slip away
to slip away
to og

As examples 48, 49 and 53 show, the use of non-standard lexemes can be

combined with orthographic modications such as sound loss or eye dialect. It is
unnecessary to give a complete list of lexemes that can be labelled `colloquial':
they are used to translate both Jim and Huck's speech in all the translations
studied, and occur much more frequently in the more recent translations.
The admittedly fuzzy category `Regional Words' includes all lexemes that
characterize a speaker from any rural part of the German speaking world.
These are the words the Duden Dictionary usually classies as `landschaftlich'
[regional]. Examples are `nimmer' [never] (NN 1980) or, again, `duster' [pitchdark] (Rathjen). Colloquial and regional words have a similar stylistic eect on the
German-speaking reader as many of the non-standard spelling features mentioned above. Moreover, the literary depiction of registers other than the socially
or regionally unmarked German standard has been widespread ever since the
realist period. Not surprisingly, many of the non-standard lexemes found in the
translation corpus can also be seen in Fontane's texts (e.g. duster Fontane [1890]
1973b: 116). It seems fair to interpret the use of such features in the translations of
Huckleberry Finn as a literary-realist attempt to create a parallelism between the
social status of the two runaways and their literary speech form.
It is probably in order to amplify the eect of the morpho-syntactic and
syntactic features that translators sometimes choose unusual variants of an
obvious direct translation. In one notable example, Beheim-Schwarzbach has
Jim say `Versammlung mit Beten' (Beheim-Schwarzbach 1966) instead of
Gebetsversammlung [Twain: camp-meetn']. This clumsy paraphrase symbolically
establishes Jim as a person who does not know or does not nd the right words.
Morpho-syntactic features
Many of the linguistic particularities of the translation corpus have to do with
the German morpho-syntactic system. Learners of German as a second
language are aware that there are many ways of violating well-formedness in
this area. In the source text there are no parallels to the following features. The
rst three categories are extremely frequent in the translations up until the
1960s. They involve violations of the German morpho-syntactic system, either
in terms of congruence, case-marking or gender:
54. congruence:
55. case:

Jim
und Stromung sind reissend
gewesen (Schloss)
[and the torrent were raging]
sindn ganze (=nominative instead
of accusative) Tag weg (Harranth,
cf. appendix, 15)

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Standard Form
und die Stromung ist
reissend gewesen
[and the torrent was raging]
sind den ganzen Tag weg

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600
56. gender:

BERTHELE
die Platz (= feminine article
instead of masculine; Schloss)

der Platz
[the place]

A good example of a similar learner variety is the French character `Dumont'

in Ferdinand Raimund's play `Der Verschwender' ( [1834] 1960):
57. Ja, Messieurs, der Natur [die Natur, nature; wrong gender, m instead of f] sein gro.
[. . .] Der ganzen Nacht [Die ganze Nacht, the whole night; wrong gender, m instead
of f, and unidentiable case because of wrong congruence between article and
adjective] bin ick am Fenster gelegen, um der Gegend [die Gegend, the landscape;
wrong gender, m instead of f, and wrong case, nominative instead of accusative] zu
betrachten. [. . .] Ein wahrer Naturfreund mussen ihrer Schonheit [ihre Schonheit,
her beauty, genitive instead of accusative] auch im Schlaf bewundern konnen.
(Raimund [1834] 1960: 26.)

None of these violations of German grammar can be assessed as colloquial

or regional features discussed above; they stand unambiguously for a lack of
linguistic competence. The fact that these violations do not occur sporadically
but in large numbers in the translations allow us to exclude the hypothesis
that they represent the occasional errors of a native speaker of German. Given
the resemblance to Raimund's Frenchman `Dumont', it seems clear that these
grammatical failures characterize Jim as a learner of the German language.
The implications of constructing such a learner-language will be considered
below.
Another very striking feature that points in exactly the same direction is the
use of what I call `innitive language'. It can be found in almost all translations
until the 1960s. Jim's speech is full of undeclined innitives (or past participles)
for the whole verbal paradigm:
Jim
58. Tja, das sein gewesen so (BeheimSchwarzbach, see appendix, 1)
59. Ich Berg hinablaufen und Schi
stehlen wollen (NN, see appendix, 7)

Standard Verb Form

Tja, das ist so gewesen / war so
Ich lief den Berg hinab und
wollte ein Schi stehlen

This type of `innitive language' is a characteristic of the very rst stages of

a learner language (cf. Diehl et al. 2000: 165) and quite common among
people who learn German in an unmonitored setting.6 In German literature
this type of speech is widely used for the speech of idiots, savages or, of course,
for L2learners of the German language. There are some good examples of
innitive language in the Dumont-passages quoted above (`sein gross' instead
of `ist gross'; `Naturfreund mussen [. . .] bewundern' instead of `muss
bewundern', etc.). Probably the most striking example for the present context,
the extremely successful German writer Karl May, uses innitive language for
African Americans. In his novel Old Surehand, published in 1894, `Nigger Bob'
says:
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May [1894] 1983: 500
60. Bob nur machen Spass,
schonen Spass! Bob doch
nicht werden iehen lassen
Indianer, wenn er soll
aufpassen auf ihn!

601

Standard syntax
Bob macht nur Spass,
schonen Spass! Bob wird
doch den Indianer nicht
iehen lassen, wenn er
auf ihn aufpassen soll!

My translation
Bob only kidding,
nice kidding! Bob
not going to let
escape Indian, if
he must keep an
eye on him!

Bob's speech is not only full of innitives but also exhibits other grammatical
errors such as wrong word order and missing articles. `Bob' in May's novel is
the characteristic loyal, good-hearted but quite dull-witted slave, who makes
everybody laugh with his ridiculous way of talking and acting.
There is another early and particularly revealing parallel to the syntactic
features described here: the play `Weh dem, der lugt', written in the 1830s by the
Austrian poet Franz Grillparzer. A character named Galomir speaks in a way that
parallels strongly the examples cited above (Grillparzer [1840] 1960: 237):
61. Noch einmal rufen. [. . .] Hup! [. . .] Ah! Niemand horen.
[Call again.
Nobody hear.]

This character is explicitly portrayed as simple-minded; even his ancee

addresses him as `der dumme Galomir' [stupid Galomir] (cf. Grillparzer
[1840] 1960: 231). This fragmentary pidgin-like language plays an important
role to generate humorous eects in Grillparzer's comedy.
The evidence from the German literary texts is unambiguous. Having Jim
speak in innitives portrays him either as foreign, uneducated or simpleminded. A Jim who speaks this way was an object of ridicule for both translators
and readers in the rst half of the twentieth century both from a cognitive and
linguistic point of view he is presented as decient.
There are several other morpho-syntactic features in the translation corpus
worth mentioning. In Twain's English original Jim sometimes uses nonstandard forms for the past participle or the past tense, especially those of
strong and irregular verbs. Just for once this device works in the very same way
in German (and in this respect, the translation authentically represents the
original):
Jim
62. ich hab geweisst
(Harranth)

Standard Verb Form

ich habe gewusst

Twain
I knowed (see
appendix, 15)

As in the English original, irregularities and exceptions in the linguistic

system can be used to dierentiate the less educated and the educated
characters in the novel's ctional world. However, there are very few examples
of this sort of translation, and despite the quest for authenticity in literary
translation this feature remains almost unused in the German translations.
Harranth (1995) is the only translator to exploit irregularity in this way.
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BERTHELE

Syntactic features
The most frequently used devices to mark Jim's speech syntactically are
violations of German grammar, in particular, wrong word order and missing
articles:
Jim
63. Ich Berg hinablaufen und
Schi stehlen wollen (NN,
see appendix, 7)

Standard syntax
Ich lief den Berg hinab
und wollte ein Schi
stehlen

English
[steal boat instead of
steal a boat]

This recalls Bob's speech (cf. also example 60):

64. Indianer [Der Indianer/the Indian] soll nicht werden hauen und schlagen, auch soll
nicht werden erstechen oder erschieen, und Masser Bob ihn doch nicht fortlassen.
Da Masser Bob sein klug und pg und ihm binden acht lange Stangen auf Buckel
[auf den Buckel/on his back]. (May [1894] 1992: 433)

Missing articles and wrong word order have a very strong connotation as
features produced by beginning German language-learners.
Double negation is another syntactic feature found in the corpus. In German,
as in English, it is a way of intensifying negation associated with archaic or
dialectal speech. In most Swiss German and southern German dialects, for
instance, double negation is still quite common especially in certain idiomatic
phrases. In SHG, however, it is no longer current (cf. Drosdowski 1984: 644;
Helbig/Buscha 1991: 527; Zifonun, Homan and Strecker 1997: 857).
65. Da sa' 'ch mir, 'n Flooss is', was ich brauch; das macht nam'ich keine Spur'n nich'.
(Rathjen, see appendix, 20)
66. Hab aber kein Gluck nich gehabt. (Schonfeldt, see appendix, 27)

As in the case of non-standard past tense forms, the use of double negation
has very similar sociolinguistic connotation eects in English and in German,
but only three translators take advantage of this parallel (cf. Figure 1).
A regional syntactic feature used in two more recent translations is the
relative clause with the dialectal `wo' instead of one of the SHG pronouns `der,
die, das' etc:
Jim
Standard syntax
Twain, see appendix, 10
67. sie in jedm Boot, wo in jedem Boot, das every skift dat went 'long
vorbeikommt
vorbeikommt
(Harranth)

This use of the `wo'-pronoun is a marker of southern dialects in the Germanspeaking area. Although it is a violation of SHG grammar, its use has none of
the `pidginized' connotations of most of the morpho-syntactic errors attributed
to Jim in the translation corpus.
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603

Modication of Jim's speech

It has already been mentioned above that some translators choose to completely
or partially rephrase Jim's narration. In the paragraphs investigated here,
translators using indirect speech either give Jim no `direct' voice at all or
combine reported speech and direct speech with features of decit. In Eger's
translation from 1944 the indirect rephrasing of parts of Jim's narration is
introduced by a revealing phrase. Huck says:
68. Aus dem, was Jim weiter berichtete, erriet ich, [. . .] dass er alles im Stich liess und
Hals uber Kopf aus dem Hause eilte [. . . ]. (Eger)

The bold text in example 68 means, that Huck guessed from Jim's narration
what had happened. Jim is presented as someone whose verbal output is hardly
intelligible and must be made accessible through guessing. In some translations
Jim's account is simplied or shortened, and Walter Keiler in 1927 even omits it
completely without any replacement.
In some cases, the translators add details to Jim's narration. But when they
do, it is mainly to generate an eect of simple-mindedness:
69. Wenn armes Jim laufen mit die Fusse, Hunde werden nden seine Spur. (Schloss)
[My translation: If poor Jim walk with his feet, dogs would track him.]

Here the translator Marie Schloss has Jim express the self-evident fact that he
usually walks with his feet. In a clear example of racist attribution of stupidity to
Jim, Henny Koch has Jim think that African-American people are not seen at
night (Jim refers to himself in the 3rd person):
70. Er denken, Nacht sein schwarz, Jim sein auch schwarz, werden also nix gesehen.
(Koch)
[My translation: He think, night be black, Jim be black, too, will not be seen.]

Jim's thought cannot be found in the source text (cf. Appendix) and its addition
therefore is an enormous liberty of the translator.
FROM COGNITIVE DEFICIT TO SOCIOLINGUISTIC DIFFERENCE
The evolution of translation strategies
As we have seen in the previous sections, it is very dicult to assign
unambiguous meanings to translation variants. We have to take into account
the complex sociolinguistic relationships between non-standard and standard
varieties as well as the semiotic layers of the relevant literary texts. There is
quite a wide range of possible sociolinguistic interpretations for a specic
linguistic feature. However, as demonstrated above, some translation devices
are both added by the translator (they have no equivalents in the source text)
and are clear-cut signs of the translator's devaluation of Jim's speech. These
features are mainly situated on the morpho-syntactic and syntactic levels:
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1997 Rathjen

1995 Harranth

1980 NN

1978 Schonfeldt

1966 Beheim-Schwarzbach

1970 Helmstaedt

1963 Kruger

1950 Weseloh

1944 Eger

1921 Steindor

1927 Keiler

1913 Schloss

Colloquial Words

BERTHELE

1890 Koch

604

Regional Words
Dialectal Syntax
Double Negation

Eye Dialect

Sound/Syllable Loss

Reanalysis

Modication

Spelling Mistakes

Congruence Mistakes

Genus Mistakes

Case Mistakes

Innitive Language

Missing Articles

Wrong Word Order

Reported Speech

Figure 1: German editions and their use of linguistic features for Jim's speech.
If a given translation uses a certain feature it is marked with a `+' sign in the
corresponding column: The bold horizontal line separates linguistic features
that create dierence in the upper part from linguistic features that unambiguously create decit in the lower part. The shaded lines indicate the features
on the level of spelling; the other features are above the level of spelling
violations of number and gender congruence, wrong case markers, innitive
language, wrong word order and missing articles. Evidence from German
literature makes it very clear that these devices do not simply serve to situate
a character on a certain level in the sociolinguistic stratum, but also brand that
character as being `other' as well as decient (cf. Dumont's foreigner talk and
`the stupid Galomir').
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On the contrary, orthographic depictions of dierence are not always as clearcut indices of cognitive decit; only spelling mistakes play this role unambiguously. In all other cases, respellings can index (relatively neutral) regional
linguistic dierences or (ranked) sociolinguistic dierences. Here we nd ample
evidence in German literature that the frequency of non-standard orthography
correlates positively with lower social strata. The use of sociolinguistically lower
registers certainly responds to the quest for `equivalence' between source and
target text. In Twain's ctional world both Jim and Huck belong to lower social
strata, and have only very rudimentary educations. While it is certainly true
that cognitive decits are often stereotypically attributed on the basis of low
social status, I argue that social standing and intellectual (and even moral)
worth are not necessarily represented as congruent in particular texts.
Figure 1 sums up the diachronic use of the features analyzed in this
contribution. The shaded columns represent two translations which either
completely skip Jim's narration (Keiler) or transpose it entirely into reported
speech (Helmstaedt).7 The gure shows quite clearly that the earlier translations
mainly use decit features whereas more recent translations (cf. Harrant's and
Rathjen's text) favor the dierence features.
This shift in translation features coincides with a change in the tone of
translators' prefaces and afterwords. Whereas the blurb of a reedition8 of
Schloss' translation characterizes Jim as the `Einfaltiger Neger Jim' (`simpleminded Nigger Jim'), by the 1970's attitudes seem to have changed. In a preface
to the 1978 translation by Schonfeldt, the editor explicitly informs the reader
that this novel is to be read as an `appeal against slavery and disdain for
African-American people' (Schonfeldt 1978: 305).9 Similar statements can be
found in the blurb of a reedition (1979) of Lore Kruger's translation.10 As a
consequence of this anti-racist and anti-discriminatory interpretation of the
novel, Schonfeldt has Jim speak a close-to standard German variety (cf. the very
few `+'-signs in the corresponding column in Figure 1). This of course comes
with a considerable loss of linguistic diversity. If Jim is no longer to be
discriminated against, he can also not be distinguished linguistically any longer.
Huck's voice as a quasi-standard
In order to understand the history of the translation of Jim's AAVE in German,
we must go further than the classication of the orthographic and linguistic
features found in the translation corpus. In this section, I assess the nonstandard features attributed to Jim through a comparison with the way the
speech of Huck Finn, the main character of the novel, is translated. This
comparison is particularly important because Huck is the rst-person narrator
in the novel, which means that his voice is the dominant one in the book.
Huck's variety is therefore the quasi-standard inside the ctional world of
Twain's novel. Deviations from Huck's `standard' can be sociolinguistically
more prestigious, like the speech of the few characters who speak (or try to
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606

BERTHELE

speak) a near-standard variety (e.g. Miss Watson, Judge Thatcher), but Twain
very often uses such higher styles to make fun of the `better' people.
In this comparison of the translations of Jim's and Huck's speech, there are
two main issues; dierences in the distribution of decit-features in Huck's and
Jim's speech and the (quantitative) role played by non-standard spelling in the
translations. There are some inevitable diculties involved in the operationalization of a concept like `decit-index'. Since decit features are predominantly
located in the morpho-syntactic system, we have to create variables on the basis
of how many phrases/sentences involve violations of German grammar. If we
apply such an approach to the corpus, we nd that in all translations up until
1966 and in 1980, close to 100 percent of Jim's utterances have some sort of
grammatical violations. Huck's speech displays only some negligible and
sporadic grammatical violations.
Since this kind of measure for both Huck and Jim would be invariant until the
very recent translations, I decided to do without the decit-index for Huck Finn
and to create a dierent variable only for Jim, referring to the matrix in Figure 1.
If all of the eight `decit-generating' strategies are used in a certain translation,
Jim gets 100 percent, if none is to be found, he gets 0 percent.
The second kind of operationalization of decit measures the proportion of
non-standard spelling in Huck's and Jim's passages. The variable is constructed
on the basis of how many words11 (of all words in the analyzed passage) contain
non-standard spellings. The translations which skip or paraphrase Jim's narration (Keiler 1927 and Helmstaedt 1970) had to be removed from these
descriptive statistics. Figure 2 shows the development of the three variables.
At rst glance Figure 2 shows that non-standard spelling does not appear
very frequently in the more modern translations. It is interesting, however, that

Figure 2: Non-standard spellings and decit features

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607

even at the low level seen in 1913, 1921, 1944 and 1963 there is a clear
dierence in frequency between Huck and Jim. In 1921, 1944 and 1963 it is
Jim who has higher values. In 1913 Jim's spelling is almost perfectly in
agreement with the norm and it is Huck who shows more non-standard
spellings. Simultaneously the course of the `decit'-line leaves no doubt about
the strategies used to linguistically characterize Jim.
The two latest translations, from 1995 and 1997, show an important
increase of the use of non-standard spellings as well as obvious dierences
between Jim and Huck. The rst translation which shows a little more nonstandard spelling compared to the `decit tradition' is Kruger's text from 1963.
In 1997 Jim deviates in a drastic way from Huck's (and certainly all the other
characters') non-standard-spelling rate. As the `decit'-line shows, this is the
rst text to completely abandon the decit-strategy and it is very probable that
the expansion of other linguistic dierences in this text is in part a compensation
for the loss of such a salient feature of distinction. Although there are no
`perfect' continuous lines, Figure 2 shows that translators gradually turn away
from the decit features and use more and more respellings.
This change in translation strategies corresponds quite well to the (admittedly
spare) recommendations made by translation handbooks. For example, Fritz
Guttinger (1963) advocates translating literary dialects with a variety very
close to spoken standard language, based on his view that translations of
dialectal speech into the dialects of the target language inevitably results in
inadequate local stereotypes (Guttinger 1963: 189; for very similar claims see
Levy 1969: 101; Diller/Kornelius 1978: 82; Graf/Schonfeld 1983: 89). This
philosophy is consistent with the eect of most of the features in the upper half
of Figure 1.
In 1983, a workshop organized by the European translation committee
focused explicitly on dealing with `Black American English' (Graf/Schonfeld
1983). This workshop led to the production of a glossary with AAVE lexemes
and corresponding standard English paraphrases. In this document, AAVE is
denitely no longer seen as a decit-variety. Several translation strategies are
weighted against each other and the participating translators seemed to give a
light preference to the choice of a colloquial, slangy German which can be
located in the `Ruhrgebiet', the important center of heavy industry in Germany
(Graf/Schonfeld 1983: 89). This solution gives the German parallel to AAVE a
clear proletarian overtone, and it is probably not too far from Harranth's and
Rathjen's translation attempts.
CONCLUSION
To conclude, I will reect on two issues: authenticity in translation of dialect
and degrees of stigma in non-standard representations of dialect speech. The
more recent translations show that there are always tensions and trade-os for
the translator who wants to `authentically' render novels in which dialectal
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608

BERTHELE

dierence plays a signicant role. In Schonfeldt's case, dialectal dierence is

sacriced in order to not portray Jim in a negative light. As a consequence, Jim's
distinctive and non-standard voice does not come through at all in this version.
At the same time, it is clear that nding an adequate German dialectal
equivalent for Jim's voice is a dicult task. It is possible to render AAVE with
a sociolect or dialect that represents analogous (low) social strata or even
analogous regional linguistic identity. But the analogy is, of course, never
complete; there is no perfect equivalent of Black:White race relations (and
corresponding sociolinguistic relationships) in the German-speaking world.
Every German variety is also more than just class-based: each one carries
historical, regional or social connotations. In this respect, making Jim speak a
Berlin underclass dialect, Saxonian dialect, Yiddish or Swiss German adds layers
of social connotations that are by no means equivalent to the setting of Twain's
novel. The very latest translations avoid this dilemma in their representation of
Jim's speech with features that connote colloquial, casual German, at the cost,
of course, of conveying the strong regional character of Twain's book.
In their choices of how to represent Jim's language, German translators
position themselves with reference to racism and segregation in the society
portrayed by Twain (and indirectly, in their own society). Some of their
representational strategies ascribe greater `decit' to Jim's character than
others, and over time, there is a shift away from the more stigmatizing of
these strategies. In earlier translations, we nd that some translators render
Jim's (but not Huck's) speech as a pidgin-like learner's English, even though in
the English original, both Jim's and Huck Finn's speech deviate systematically
from standard grammar. As neither the translations nor the source text provide
any evidence for Jim being a speaker of another L1 than the one he speaks in the
text, these translations represent Jim as fundamentally decient: as unable to
speak any language properly.
The rst German text to abandon the decit-model is Lore Kruger's (1963)
translation, in which we nd very few decit features but numerous nonstandard spellings for Jim. This text marks the beginning of a more general shift
in the representation of Jim that is linked to social changes which increasingly
sanction the expression of racism towards Africans and African Americans
(reected in the blurbs and afterwords of more recent translations mentioned
above). At the same time, translators continue to manipulate linguistic and
graphic features of their texts to capture Jim's (and Huck's) sociolinguistic
particularities; in particular their proletarian, unschooled character. Jim's
unschooled, ethnic English is symbolically rendered by translation strategies
such as respellings (eye dialect, loss, reanalysis, modication), with specic
lexical choices and some syntactic devices (double negation, regional syntax).
I have argued that these features index sociological categories, but do not
necessarily brand Jim as cognitively and linguistically decient. This does not
mean that these dierence-generating strategies cannot carry stigma. This is
because the sociological categories they index are ranked; therefore respellings
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and other strategies that index social dierence also stereotypically stigmatize
some speakers. But in fact in Twain's novel and in the translations
stereotypes are often turned on their heads, and there is no correlation between
speaking well and being intelligent or morally upright. Critics agree that Jim is
the only moral grown-up in the novel (cf. Fisher Fishkin 1993: 79.), and all
German translations studied here are faithful in their representation of Jim's
moral worth. This returns us to an earlier point: that evaluations of the stigmagenerating potential of particular orthographic and other linguistic representations have to be made within specic sociolinguistic, historical and textual
contexts.

NOTES
1. Acknowledgement: I wish to thank Alexandra Jae and Harald Fricke for their very
valuable comments and suggestions, and the `Schweizerisches Jugendbuch-Institut
Zurich', particularly Mrs. Villiger Abogso Fouda, who was extremely helpful for
nding many various German translations of Twain's Huckleberry Finn.
2. Strictly speaking this dierence between African-American and white characters is
undisputed only for the phonological level, cf. Fisher Fishkin's (1993) critical study
of Huck's `black voice'.
3. One of the latest translations is Wurth's (1997) Alemanic dialect text. This as far
as I know rst dialect translation in the German-speaking world is not easily
comparable to the `standard' German texts and has therefore not been taken into
account in the current contribution (for a detailed analysis cf. Berthele [in print] ).
4. All examples given here can be found in Jim's utterances in the analyzed passage
and for every example the corresponding translator's name will be given in brackets.
5. cf. Drosdowski (1996): Regel 13, p. 23f.; Drosdowski (1984): 195, p. 120.
6. This generalized use of innitives can be found in the talk of the informants in
Frischherz (1997), all of which are persons seeking political asylum in Switzerland.
7. After having detected this unexpected strategy I chose another passage in order to
look for the means of translation. It turns out that both texts give Jim a highly
decient voice similar to the texts by Koch or Schloss. I decided however to keep to
exactly the same passage for all translations because of the very striking and
meaningful fact that it is also possible to give a character as little speech/voice as
absolutely necessary.
8. Exact date unknown, probably in the 1950s, Atrium Verlag Zurich.
9. `Man kann und sollte das Buch als einen Appell gegen die Sklaverei und die
Missachtung der Schwarzen lesen.'
10. `[. . .] ist die scharfe Kritik Mark Twains an den zeitgenossischen Verhaltnissen in
den amerikanischen Sudstaaten, an Rassendiskriminierung und Sklavenhaltung
unuberhorbar.'
11. As a word I counted every printed unity located between two blanks or of course
between blanks and punctuation marks.

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Primary literature:
Square brackets indicate the year of the rst edition. For translations of Huckleberry Finn
into German the year of their rst publication is given in the reference. Sometimes I was not
able to get hold of these rst editions of the respective translations, the year of publication of
the examined later editions is given in square brackets at the end of the references.
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Volume 2. Munchen 19601965: Carl Hanser Verlag. 183256.
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May, Karl. [1894] 1983. Old Surehand I. Reiseerzahlung. Reprint der ersten Buchausgabe von
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Twain/Beheim-Schwarzbach. 1966. Die Abenteuer des Tom Sawyer und Huckleberry Finn.
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Twain/Eger. 1944. Huckleberry Finn's Fahrten und Abenteuer. Zurich: Schweizer Druckund Verlagshaus.
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Verlag.
Twain/Helmstaedt. 1970. Huckleberry Finns Abenteuer und Fahrten. Balve: EngelbertVerlag.
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Twain/Kruger. 1963. Huckleberry Finns Abenteuer. Zurich, Koln: Benziger Verlag.
[1979].
Twain/NN. 1980. Tom Sawyer und Huckleberry Finn. Wien: Tosa Verlag.
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Twain/Steindor. 1921. Huckleberry Finns Abenteuer und Fahrten. Berlin: Ullstein.
[1922].
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Wassermann, Jakob. [1908] 1996. Caspar Hauser oder die Tragheit des Herzens. Munchen.

APPENDIX
Jim's account
In Twain [1884] 1988: 53f.
(1) Well, you see, it 'uz dis way. (2) Ole missus dat's Miss Watson she
pecks on me all de time, en treats me pooty rough, but she awluz said she
wouldn' sell me down to Orleans. (3) But I noticed dey wuz a nigger trader roun'
de place considable, lately, en I begin to git oneasy. (4) Well, one night I creeps
to de do', pooty late, en de do' warn't quite shet, en I hear ole missus tell de
widder she gwyne to sell me down to Orleans, but she didn' want to, but she
could git eight hund'd dollars for me, en it 'uz sich a big stack o' money she
couldn' resis'. (5) De widder she try to git her to say she wouldn' do it, but I
never waited to hear de res'. (6) I lit out mighty quick, I tell you.
(7) I tuck out en shin down de hill en 'spec to steal a skift 'long de sho' som'ers
'bove de town, but dey wuz people a-stirrin' yit, so I hid in de ole tumble-down
cooper shop on de bank to wait for everybody to go 'way. (8) Well, I wuz dah all
night. (9) Dey wuz somebody roun' all de time. (10) 'Long 'bout six in de
mawnin', skifts begin to go by, en 'bout eight er nine every skift dat went 'long
wuz talkin' 'bout how yo' pap come over to de town en say you's killed. (11)
Dese las' skifts wuz full o' ladies en genlmen agoin' over for to see de place. (12)
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Sometimes dey'd pull up at de sho' en take a res' b'fo' dey started acrost, so by de
talk I got to know all 'bout de killin'. (13) I 'uz powerful sorry you's killed, Huck,
but I ain't no mo', now.
(14) I laid dah under de shavins all day. (15) I 'uz hungry, but I warn't afeard;
bekase I knowed ole missus en de widder wuz goin' to start to de camp-meetn'
right arter breakfas' en be gone all day, en dey knows I goes o wid de cattle
'bout daylight, so dey wouldn' 'spec to see me roun' de place, en so dey wouldn'
miss me tell arter dark in de evenin'. (16) De yuther servants wouldn' miss me,
kase dey'd shin out en take holiday soon as de ole folks 'uz out'n de way.
(17) Well, when it come dark I tuck out up de river road, en went 'bout two
mile er more to whah dey warn't no houses. (18) I'd made up my mine 'bout
what I's agwyne to do. (19) You see ef I kep' on tryin' to git away afoot, de dogs
'ud track me; ef I stole a skift to cross over, dey'd miss dat skift, you see, en dey'd
know 'bout whah I'd lan' on de yuther side en whah to pick up my track. (20)
So I says, a ra is what I's arter; it doan' make no track.
(21) I see a light a-comin' roun' de p'int, bymeby, so I wade' in en shove' a log
ahead o' me, en swum more'n half-way acrost de river, en got in 'mongst de
drift-wood, en kep' my head down low, en kinder swum agin de current tell de
ra come along. (22) Den I swum to de stern uv it, en tuck aholt. (23) It clouded
up en 'uz pooty dark for a little while. (24) So I clumb up en laid down on de
planks. (25) De men 'uz all 'way yonder in de middle, whah de lantern wuz.
(26) De river wuz arisin' en dey wuz a good current; so I reck'n'd 'at by fo' in de
mawnin' I'd be twenty-ve mile down de river, en den I'd slip in, jis' b'fo'
daylight, en swim asho' en take to de woods on de Illinoi side.
(27) But I didn' have no luck. (28) When we 'uz mos' down to de head er de
islan', a man begin to come aft wid de lantern. (29) I see it warn't no use fer to wait,
so I slid overboard, en struck out fer de islan'. (30) Well, I had a notion I could lan'
mos' anywhers, but I couldn't bank too blu. (31) I 'uz mos' to de foot er de islan'
b'fo' I foun' a good place. (32) I went into de woods en jedged I wouldn' fool wid
ras no mo', long as dey move de lantern roun' so. (33) I had my pipe en a plug er
dog-leg, en some matches in my cap, en dey warn't wet, so I 'uz all right.

Address correspondence to:

Raphael Berthele
Departement fur Germanistik
Linguistik des Deutschen
University of Fribourg
Misericorde
CH-1700 Freiburg/Fribourg
Switzerland
raphael.berthele@unifr.ch
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