SOURCE: Auty, Robert. “Prešeren's German Poems.” Oxford Slavonic Papers 6 (1973): 1-11.

In the following essay, Auty discusses the complex relationship between Prešeren's German and Slovene poems, noting the high quality of his thirty-six extant German compositions, and observing his interesting status as a bilingual poet.

In his stimulating book The Poet's Tongues¹ Professor Leonard Forster has drawn attention to the phenomenon of polyglot poets and the poetry they write—poetry, that is to say, which is written in a language that is not the poet's native tongue; and he has described and subtly analysed a whole series of examples ranging from the Middle Ages to the last few years. Although he touches in passing on the linguistic situation in pre-1918 Prague Professor Forster does not discuss any examples of polyglot poetry from eastern or east-central Europe; for he is basing himself on his ‘personal experience of multilingual...