A tale of two Germanias: Translations of Tacitus into Danish in the Revolutionary Decade

Abstract

Tacitus’ Germania was translated into Danish twice in the 1790s, first by the historian and jurist Gustav Ludvig Baden (1764–1839) in 1795, and then by his father, the professor of rhetoric Jacob Baden (1735–1805) in 1797. Both translations can be understood as part of a sustained effort to introduce Tacitean and other concepts from classical literature to enrich philosophical reasoning in the vernacular.

The politics of the translations were radically at odds. Through the rhetorical use of conceptual vocabulary, exhaustive footnotes, and an unstable temporality, G. L. Baden constructed a narrative of a democratic republican and rationalist ‘golden age’ relevant for contemporary Denmark-Norway. Jacob Baden’s foreignizing translation was a conservative response. It employed a stable modern historicity which separated the ‘golden age’ from the barbarous reality of northern antiquity.

The article raises the question of the significance of oblique argument in the constrained Danish-Norwegian public sphere of the 1790s. The form of G. L. Baden’s translation is characterised by a temporal and linguistic strategic ambiguity. This provided a veil of deniability for the translator, but the translation was clearly understood to be a radical polemic, eliciting reactions in the public sphere.