ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Friedrich von Oertel's rendering uses Brockden Brown's narrative to construct a love triangle for his German reader who is struggling to negotiate English and French influences. Brown's Ormond engages with similar problems: Brown reflects on American national literature's claim to be the culmination of an Atlantic translatio, as well as a cultural export in its own right. Translation could be put into the service of a nationalist project; the Verdeutschung of foreign literature was productive of national culture. If the concept of translatio studii assumes that translation serves the civilising process, Oertel seeks to remind his readers of the incivility latent in cultural transfer, one which relegated the lowly translator to a medium for market transactions. The post-classical model of absorbing a text into a new culture is the translatio studii et imperii, the transfer of learning and empire, a modernised version of which exerted significant influence on German literary production at Oertel's historical moment.
