Need help with German blackletter text fragment

[GrannyGrump]

I'm not sure where to post this, Mods please move if needed.

This is a shameless begging post. I'm working on a Twain book (The Gilded Age), and trying to restore passages that are missing from the Gutenberg edition. These are epigrams in various foreign languages.

The one that is kicking me around is a stanza from a poem by Heine, "Angelique" stanza 4. I need to get this fragment in German, but since I don't speak German, and my google-skills are obviously lacking, I have not been successful.

The attached screenshot is a screenshot of the pdf from internet archive, in blackletter font, the cleanest pdf I found (the OCR is utter garbage). If it hadn't been blackletter, I could have transcribed it with no problem.

Please, could some very kind soul who speaks German find me a text of this stanza *in German*? (I already have English translation.) It will win you a gold star, and my eternal gratitude.

[skreutzer]

The text is:

Wie entwickeln sich doch schnelle
Aus der flüchtigsten Empfindung
Leidenschaften ohne Grenzen
Und die zärtlichste Verbindung?
Täglich wächst zu dieser Dame
Meines Herzens tiefste Neigung,
Und dass ich in sie verliebt sei,
Wird mir fast zür Ueberzeugung.

Please note a few things here. In blackletter typesetting, there is a short and a long 's', where the long 's' (looking like a 'f') has an Antiqua equivalent, available via UTF-8: 'ſ'. However, in the current German alphabet, it is replaced by the ordinary long 's'. If you're going to preserve the long 's', you should decide if you want to be compliant with contemporary or todays blackletter rules, the word "dass" would be wrong according to latest blackletter rules, the correct version would be "daſs". Note in "Ueberzeugung" that the combination "Ue" was used if the font of the typesetter hadn't a capital Umlaut "Ü", so in current German usage you might want to replace it with "Überzeugung", while "Ue" is still recognized as "Ue" by German readers, mostly because "Ue" is used as replacement for "Ü" in plain ASCII texts. The word "zür" should usually be "zur", there's some strange language use going on there, but it might have been common at the time or environment of Heine.

[Jellby]

As far as I can see, it says:

Wie enwickeln ſich doch ſchnelle
Aus der flüchtigſten Empfindung
Leidenſchaften ohne Grenzen
Und die zärtlichſte Verbindung?
Täglich wächſt zu dieſer Dame
Meines Herzens tiefſte Neigung,
Und dass ich in ſie verliebt ſei,
Wird mir faſt zür Ueberzeugung.

Now you can google it

Some notes:

- It uses long-s when the s is not final, as usual in blackletter.
- The ss in "dass" should probably be ß or ſs... the second s looks a bit different though, maybe some German speaker can shed more light.
- Is the last "zür" a typo for "zur"?
- The initial Ue in the last word should be Ü. Maybe the English typesetter didn't have the Ü, or maybe this was customary in blackletter too.
- The third-to-last line definitely says "Meines Herzens tiefſte", and not "Meiner Herzens tiefe".

EDIT: I see we agree

[GrannyGrump]

Well, many many thanks to both of you.
I don't know about typographic conventions in 1874 when this was published, but I did note that the publisher had some other rather egregious errors in the main text (American English) of the book, so I would not be surprised if they had errors in the blackletter as well.

I shall have to find an embeddable font with good unicode support for this bit.

Thanks again, so very much.



PS --- I stand in awe of anyone who can decipher an old blackletter font -- I couldn't read at least half of the characters, too many spikes and twists!

[doubleshuffle]

Here's a link to the poem in the Düsseldorfer Heineausgabe.

I'll have a look in some old posts in the German forum - there was someone a while back who uploaded some blackletter epubs...

[doubleshuffle]

Two interesting links I've found in the German forum:

http://unifraktur.sourceforge.net/

http://www.peter-wiegel.de/Fonts/index.html

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by GrannyGrump

I shall have to find an embeddable font with good unicode support for this bit.

I needed one for this book, maybe you can use it too.

[skreutzer]

Originally Posted by GrannyGrump

I shall have to find an embeddable font with good unicode support for this bit.

What are you actually trying to do? Represent the text as blackletter in EPUB according to the original? Represent the text as blackletter in EPUB according to current blackletter rules? Represent the text in Antiqua, but character-equivalent? Note that most blackletter fonts don't have the long-'s' at the corresponding UTF-8 character code, but at a different code of a character which isn't present in the blackletter font separately. Quite common for blackletter fonts, but it leads to incompatible ASCII plain text if read without the associated blackletter font. Also note that you are required to use ligatures, if supported in the blackletter font. Maybe you should make sure that you don't use one of the modern pseudo-blackletter fonts.

[Jellby]

My advice, as in this miles-long thread (see post #16 and later), is to write the source file as skreutzer or myself wrote above (with whatever needs to be fixed, and maybe add some ligature-breakers if necessary). And leave the niceties (ligatures, long-s if using skreutzer's version) to the font... and if the renderer doesn't support these basic (I won't call them "advanced") font features, shame on it.

It shouldn't be impossible to find a decent blackletter font with s-alternates and ligatures, and it shouldn't be too hard to make it Unicode-compatible, especially if you only want to use it for a few short fragments like them.

[dickloraine]

Originally Posted by GrannyGrump

PS --- I stand in awe of anyone who can decipher an old blackletter font -- I couldn't read at least half of the characters, too many spikes and twists!

I hope that this is not the case anymore, but as I learned latin in school, the schoolbooks actualy used blackletter for the german parts... I think to have a visual clue (as if being in german was not enough).
Even some books in our house were still writen in it. I read "The Picture of Dorien Gray" in it.

But of course, the question is, if you need to use blackletter in your edition. You could instead use other visual clues to make it stand out, like margins, italics etc. It is just a matter of personal taste, how you design something like this. If you look at published books, most use a modern design even for old texts. On the other side there are faksimiles. I myself find in betweens a little bit strange. But as I said, it is a matter of taste.

[mrmikel]

Since it is a book for English language readers, it might be best to display it in modern German. It was displayed that way because (I guess) that is how German was typeset at the time.

But few of your English readers will be able to puzzle it out in blackletter, where those who have studied German should be able to figure it out.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

But few of your English readers will be able to puzzle it out in blackletter, where those who have studied German should be able to figure it out.

Yet those who have not studied German will gain nothing from being able to read it

But I agree in that you should consider twice whether or not to blackletter it. In other of your Twain books German fragments are not in blackletter, although they are part of the main text too (and sometimes what the text it about). This may be because the original was typeset like that, or a conscious style change to adapt to the new times, or simply because the ASCII text from PG have no blackletter at all.

[GrannyGrump]

Well, strangely enough (or not so strange, if you have read some of Twain's little rants on the subject), I think the "undecipherable" aspect is the main part of the joke for the epigrams in this book. I do believe they were intended as a satire on those snooty authors who cite Latin and Classical Greek with no translation for the ordinary reader.

Some of the languages used include Sanskrit, Assyrian, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Eskimo, several native American Indian languages, etc, etc, etc. (I'm having to use svg images for many of these...)

So I will make a noble attempt to use blackletter, if I can transcribe it accurately. Now that I have excellent advice and transcriptions from you folks, I might be able to do it.
If not, I'll be back...

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by skreutzer

Note that most blackletter fonts don't have the long-'s' at the corresponding UTF-8 character code, but at a different code of a character which isn't present in the blackletter font separately.

Actually, the Unifraktur fonts do, but the problem is that if the reader disables publisher fonts, they'll most likely encounter display issues, because most RMSDK ePub readers don't support the long s.

@GrannyGrump: I'd recommend using Jellby's excellent transcription and one of the Unifraktur fonts to create a high-res image of this poem.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

@GrannyGrump:[/B] I'd recommend using Jellby's excellent transcription and one of the Unifraktur fonts to create a high-res image of this poem.

Note I just fixed a typo there.