Nora : a Novel. Taken from the German by Princess
Mario Liech- tenstein. (Burns and Oates.)—Nora is not an uninteresting novel ; it is livelier and more attractive than most German stories of the :anti- mental order, and its morality is all that can be desired,—it is, indeed, of a higher kind than we are generally fortunate enough to find in novels of either home or foreign manufacture. We should have been pleased to make the acquaintance of the accomplished scion of a French raoblo house (which had espoused the cause of the Revolution) who found himself obliged to take to circus-riding, and also of his charming wife and their daughter Nora, in the tongue in which their adventures wore originally written ; and we do not at all suspect the German novel of being dull. The Princess Merle Liechtenstein is, however, a clumsy translator, capable of nothing more than a literal rendering of German sentences by their English parallels, not equivalents, and so Nora is very heavy reading in English. A translator should at least bo capable of adapting the form of the selected work to the taste and fashion of his own language, as well as of rendering words with more mechanical fidelity ; but the Princess Marie Lioolitonstoin has no motion at all of doing the former, and rather frequently fells in doing the latter ; so that " Nora" is a difficult book to got through, though the love-story is a pretty ono, and the misunderstanding which severs the lovers and determines Nora's vocation to the religious life is un- usually well managed. A more glance at the first few pages shows the reader that an unskilful hand has boon at work upon the original. Karsten, the "Director "of the Circus, in relating his early history to his wife—who has only boon six or seven years married to him, and there- -fore would of course be ignorant of it—is made to say, " My mother's relations effected my entrance into a military college," and the wife thus instructed is described as having boon "a shy and well-broughteup
young girl." Nora's young friends " live in a beautiful and large pro- perty of theirs," and Nora herself " thus with assurance wont down the stops of the old well," when it became necessary, ten years later, to compare her with a picture of Rebekah. The effect of the whole is very stiff, awkward, and cumbrous. Differently handled, the scones of circus-life might have been curious and interesting, but the artifici- ality of the translation has a benumbing effect on the entire story.
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