"You see," went on the great actor, "our friend Alphons Hector ..." and he nodded at the Herr Graf, "smells something like sulphur. After all he would like to have me burned." And he added laughing: "It's in the blood, Herr Graf, and it cannot be helped. And to think that you are the best of the lot!"
Mr. Bischoff—for I prefer to call him by this name which he has made so celebrated—turned to me and said:
"You English are a great nation. Freedom is your motto. Freedom in everything—freedom even in religion. A Jew, with you, is as complete a human being as a Christian. You have no Anti-Semitism."
"May I take it," I asked him, "that there is a little gratitude in your masterly interpretation of our Shakespeare?"
"No," replied he, "not in the least. Our art is art for art's sake. And if I succeed in rendering Shakespeare's meaning, it is due to our possessing good translations of his works."
"That may be," I declared, "but then the German tongue is so suitable to translations."
At once he flew up in a rage. And the same man who just had called us a great nation used the most abusive terms against us.
"As if any tongue were unsuitable to translations. But, of course, with you, with mean shopkeepers, with you and your mercenary point of view, how could you have good translations? I have been asked by one of your English firms to translate an English play, a rotten one, of course. 'We usually pay seven and sixpence a thousand words,' they wrote, 'but in consideration of your fame, we would pay anything up to ten shillings a thousand.' As if this could be a decisive factor! As if it were not before all necessary to be inspired by the original! And it has always been like that. A workman's pay for a workman's job, while translating in reality is the most difficult occupation in literature. Do you know who translated Macbeth into German? Wieland, a classic, Voss, a classic, Schiller, a classic, and finally Schlegel and Tieck, two classics, whose translation you have heard this evening. Goethe translated the tragedies of Voltaire and novels by Diderot and Cellini's memoirs. And Schiller translated Virgil and a Greek tragedy, and Racine's Phaedra, and French and Italian comedies. Do you think they did it for seven and sixpence a thousand words or even for ten shillings? No! They did it out of enthusiasm, out of the one feeling which creates everything great in art. They thought theirs a holy mission, and thus, amongst other things, they originated the art of translating. For translating is an art with us, while it is pot-boiling with you."
He remained silent for a minute or so.
"Yes," he said then a little more composedly, "we have excellent translations of Macbeth, wonderful translations. Yet we do not know how to play it."