Robert Guy Lionel Barrett (1884-1974)

Barrett was the second son of Robert John Barrett (1850–1921), silversmith, of 2 Pembroke Gardens, Kensington, London, and Hester Ann Hacking (1846–1929). He was educated at St Paul’s school and was elected a Demy at Magdalen College in 1903. He graduated with a 2^nd class degree in English in 1907.

During the war Barrett was interned in Ruhleben, and in the index of Ruhleben camp in 1916 his home addresses are given as 2 Pembroke Gardens, Kensington, his parental home from at least 1894 until 1915, and Bahnhofstrasse 20 III, Würzburg. His occupation, although by this time he was 31, was student. This suggests that he may have been living in Würzburg at the outbreak of war in order to improve his German.

While in the camp he wrote articles for the Camp Magazine, and was thanked by the editor for his contribution to the Christmas issue of 1916. Unfortunately his contribution, along with many others, was anonymous and so it is not possible to identify what he wrote.

Ruhleben Camp Magazine, Christmas 1916

Shortly after the war Barrett published two translations:

1) Rainer Maria Rilke’s Das Marienleben, translated into English as The Life of the Virgin Mary and published by Triltsch (Würzburg), in 1921: “This translation was submitted to Herrn Rainer Maria Rilke and is published with the kind permission of his publishers, the Insel-Verlag zu Leipzig.” But Rilke himself was unsure of the translation, writing of it: “a little volume produced with much good taste. I can’t make much beyond that out of it, however, as this language has […] remained the most insuperably alien to me.”[1] However, the note on the recording of Hindemith’s Marienleben by ArkivMusic, released in 2009, says “there’s Rilke’s gorgeous poetry, lovely in the original German, and grotesque in R.G.L. Barrett’s 1923 translation”.

2) Alice in Wonderland, translated into German as Alice im Wunderland, again published by Triltsch (Würzburg), in 1922. Barrett thought that this was the first German translation of Lewis Carroll’s book, but in fact it had been translated by Antonie Zimmermann in 1869 and by Helene Scheu-Riesz in 1919.

He may have started translating these pieces to while away the time of his internment. However, he does not seem to have had any long-term resentment towards the Germans, since in a poem for German children introducing his translation of Alice he writes: “Gebt Ihr Geld aus für die Kleine, gibt auch sie den Reingewinn der ‘Deutschen Kinderhilfe’ hin.” (If you spend money on her [Alice] she will donate the profit to the German children’s charity].[2]

In 1925 he married, in Hesse, Gladys Dora Swift (1889–1975), a graduate of University College, London, and the daughter of Thomas Swift, a civil servant.

At some time they returned to live in England and he continued translating from German. He was one of the first to translate works by Adalbert Stifter (1805–68) into English: High Forest, Christmas Eve, and Brigitta: A Tale of Hungary, publishing these himself in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and The Eclipse of 1842 in 1945. He also published The Three Falcons by Werner Bergengruen (1892–1964) in the late 1920s; Deodand: the Heart of Germany 1914, by K.B. Heinrich in 1937; and in 1944 Carols of Seven Centuries: From the German.

He died in 1974 leaving £15,000.

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[1] Quoted by Eudo C. Mason in Rilke, Europe and the English-Speaking World, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961) p. 46.

[2] Emer O’Sullivan, ‘Englishness in German Translations of Alice in Wonderland’, in Luc van Doorslaer, Peter Flynn and Joep Leerssen, eds, Interconnecting Translation Studies and Imagology, (Amsterdam, 2016).