Lenore (ballad)

"Lenore", sometimes translated as "Leonora", "Leonore" or "Ellenore", is a poem written by German author Gottfried August Bürger in 1773, and published in 1774 in the Göttinger Musenalmanach. "Lenore" is generally characterised as being part of the 18th-century Gothic ballads, and although the character that returns from its grave in the poem is not considered to be a vampire, the poem has been very influential on vampire literature. William Taylor, who published the first English translation of the ballad, would later claim that "no German poem has been so repeatedly translated into English as 'Ellenore. In the 18th century there were more than eighteen hundred different German-speaking political entities in Central Europe. During this period, due to influences from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Latin and French dominated over the German language, and German literature had mostly been modelled after French and Italian literature. These factors led few scholars to recognize the existence of a distinct German culture or literature. In order to gain acknowledgement for the German language and thus acquire a distinctively German literary tradition from which it would be possible to get a sense of nationality, philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder believed that it was necessary to preserve German idioms, for they are the element that gives a language its idiosyncrasies and distinguishes it from other languages: The idioms are the elegances of which no neighbor can deprive us and they are sacred to the tutelary goddess of the language. They are the elegances woven into the spirit of the language, and this spirit is destroyed if they are taken out. [...] Take the idiomatic out of a language and you take its spirit and power. [...] The idioms of the time of the Meistersänger, of Opitz and Logau, of Luther, etc. should be collected [...] And if they are good for nothing else they will at least open the way to the student of the language so he can understand the genius of the nationality, and explain one by the other.