In Memoriam Paul Schach, 1915-1998
1999; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 71; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2163-8195
Autores Tópico(s)Linguistic Variation and Morphology
ResumoPaul Schach, professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, passed away on October 13, 1998, just before his eighty-third birthday. He had been at Nebraska since 1951, first as associate professor (until 1955), then as professor (1955-66), and finally as Charles J. Mach Professor (1966-86), when he retired. Although he swiftly took root in the Great Plains (as he liked to call them), he came from a different part of the United States, eastern Pennsylvania, where his father, an immigrant from the Palatinate, had been a coal miner. Graduating from Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1938, he took the train south, to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, from which he received a master's degree in 1941, while instructor in German at Albright; he spent the war years as assistant professor at Albright and as a translator for the United States Navy. In 1946, he moved to North Central College in Naperville, Illinois--the first stage on his westward trek--as chairman before going on to Lincoln. In the meantime, he had received his doctorate at Penn in 1949, with a dissertation on The Use of Scenery in the Islendinga sogur, directed by the redoubtable Otto Springer, who trained Paul as a Germanic philologist (a calling of which Paul was very proud) and led him to the Old Norse studies which would comprise so much of his life's work. At the start, Paul's writing concentrated, naturally enough, on Pennsylvania German (he made his printed debut in 1945), but his initial article on a Nordic topic, the Dollzhellir episode in Orkneyinga saga, appeared in Scandinavian Studies, then under the dictatorship of Albert Morey Sturtevant, in 1949. His fascination with German-American dialectology bore early fruit in German-language articles for the Zeitschrift fur Mundartforschung (1955, 1958); but the lure of Iceland grew all too strong: a translation of Eyrbyggjasaga (1959, reprint 1977), published by the University of Nebraska Press and the American-Scandinavian Foundation (which, in those distant days, in fact maintained a venerable and excellent book series); a translation, often reprinted, of Peter Hallberg's The Icelandic Saga (1962 ff.); his own Guide to the Study of Old Norse Literature (1963), and numerous articles on Tristrams saga ok Isondar. Nor was Paul's Icelandic passion limited to the Middle Ages; with great success, he translated both stories and the novel, The Sword, by Agnar Thordarson; and one wishes that he had found the time--but how could he?--to do more for the transmission of Modern Icelandic letters. Ever helpful to others in his work, he translated Einar Ol. Sveinsson's classic study of Njal's saga (1971), and did the same for Peter Hallberg's Old Icelandic Poetry (1975). No festskrift or memorial volume for a distinguished Icelandicist or Nordist, it seemed, could appear without a solid contribution by Paul (honest as he was industrious, he never used such invitations to clean out his desk drawer): examples are in the volumes for Einar Ol. Sveinsson, Lee M. Hollander, Henry Goddard Leach, Einar Haugen, Otto Springer, Gabriel Turville-Petre, and, later, P.M. Mitchell. Efforts all his own were his translation (Paul loved German proverbs: Alte Liebe rostet nicht) of Tristrams saga in 1973 (reprinted as a Bison Book [!] in 1997), and, of course, his own rich handbook, Icelandic Sagas (1984), where he managed heroically to surmount hindrances placed in his way by the treacherous Twayne. During the 1980S, Paul's gaze, though never wavering on the Old Icelandic side, eased back toward German-America; here, together with his articles in the Yearbook of German-American Studies and elsewhere, his editorship of the fascinating volume by various hands, Language in Conflict: Linguistic Acculturation in the Great Plains (1980) should carefully be noted. Paul liked to spring surprises: essays on Russian-German dialects in his adopted part of America, on Russian-German wolf tales, on German-American newspapers in Nebraska, on Hessian and Palatine dialects west of the Mississippi. …
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