ABSTRACT
The British critic E. V. K. Brill sounded almost apologetic in 1958 when reporting on the correspondence between Wilhelm Raabe and his first two English-language translators. Raabe had his proponents in England and America, and even three translators, most famously Sofie Hermann Delffs, whose translation of AbuTelfan was the first of his books to appear in English. The year 1981 marked, of course, Raabe's 150th anniversary and was a likely time for such encouragement of efforts to bring his work to the attention of an international readership. Translations done as theses or dissertations — literary and linguistic exercises that they are, and with their critical introductions and annotations — can be a great help to us, especially in the case of Raabe, for whom so few translator's working notebooks exist. Once the translator is attuned to Raabe's narrative voice, one can keep close to the literal sense of the original text.
