German translations
soon appeared of 'The Jumping Frog and Other Stories' (1874), 'The
Gilded Age' (1874), 'The Innocents Abroad and The New Pilgrim's
Progress' (1875), 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' (1876). A few years
later his sketches, many of them, were translated into virtually all
printed languages, notably into Russian and modern Greek; and his more
extended works gradually came to be translated into German, French,
Italian, and the languages of Denmark and the Scandinavian peninsula.
The elements of the colossally grotesque, the wildly primitive, in Mark
Twain's works, the underlying note of melancholy not less than the
lawless Bohemianism, found sympathetic appreciation among the Germanic
races. George Meredith has likened the functionings of Germanic humour
to the heavy-footed antics of a dancing bear. Mark Twain's stories of
the Argonauts, the miners and desperadoes, with their primitive,
orgiastic existence; his narratives of the wild freedom of the life on
the Mississippi, the lawless feuds and barbaric encounters--all appealed
to the passion for the fantastic and the grotesque innate in the
Germanic consciousness.
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