Jonathan

Swift

Gulliver’s Travels

Into Several Remote Nations of the World

Gullivers Reisen

in ferne Länder der Welt

Übersetzt von Franz Kottenkamp
Synchronisation und Ergänzungen © Doppeltext 2022

TITELBLATT

THE PUBLISHER TO THE READER.

A LETTER FROM CAPTAIN GULLIVER TO HIS COUSIN SYMPSON.

PART I. A VOYAGE TO LILLIPUT.

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII.

PART II. A VOYAGE TO BROBDINGNAG.

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII.

PART III. A VOYAGE TO LAPUTA, BALNIBARBI, LUGGNAGG, GLUBBDUBDRIB, AND JAPAN.

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII.

CHAPTER IX.

CHAPTER X.

CHAPTER XI.

PART IV. A VOYAGE TO THE COUNTRY OF THE HOUYHNHNMS.

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII.

CHAPTER IX.

CHAPTER X.

CHAPTER XI.

CHAPTER XII.

IMPRESSUM

THE PUBLISHER TO THE READER.

The au­thor of these Travels, Mr. Lemuel Gul­li­v­er, is my an­cient and in­tim­ate friend;
there is like­wise some re­la­tion between us on the moth­er’s side.
About three years ago, Mr. Gul­li­v­er grow­ing weary of the con­course of curi­ous people com­ing to him at his house in Re­driff,
made a small pur­chase of land, with a con­veni­ent house, near Ne­wark, in Not­ting­ham­shire, his nat­ive coun­try;
where he now lives re­tired, yet in good es­teem among his neigh­bours.
Al­though Mr. Gul­li­v­er was born in Not­ting­ham­shire, where his fath­er dwelt, yet I have heard him say his fam­ily came from Ox­ford­shire;
to con­firm which, I have ob­served in the church­yard at Ban­bury in that county, sev­er­al tombs and monu­ments of the Gul­li­v­ers.
Be­fore he quit­ted Re­driff, he left the cus­tody of the fol­low­ing pa­pers in my hands, with the liberty to dis­pose of them as I should think fit. I have care­fully per­used them three times.
The style is very plain and simple; and the only fault I find is, that the au­thor, after the man­ner of trav­el­lers, is a little too cir­cum­stan­tial.
There is an air of truth ap­par­ent through the whole; and in­deed the au­thor was so dis­tin­guished for his vera­city,
that it be­came a sort of pro­verb among his neigh­bours at Re­driff, when any one af­firmed a thing,
to say, it was as true as if Mr. Gul­li­v­er had spoken it.
By the ad­vice of sev­er­al worthy per­sons, to whom, with the au­thor’s per­mis­sion, I com­mu­nic­ated these pa­pers,
I now ven­ture to send them into the world,
hop­ing they may be, at least for some time, a bet­ter en­ter­tain­ment to our young no­ble­men,
than the com­mon scribbles of polit­ics and party.
This volume would have been at least twice as large, if I had not made bold to strike out in­nu­mer­able pas­sages re­lat­ing to the winds
and tides, as well as to the vari­ations and bear­ings in the sev­er­al voy­ages,
to­geth­er with the minute de­scrip­tions of the man­age­ment of the ship in storms, in the style of sail­ors;
like­wise the ac­count of lon­git­udes and lat­it­udes; wherein I have reas­on to ap­pre­hend, that Mr. Gul­li­v­er may be a little dis­sat­is­fied.
But I was re­solved to fit the work as much as pos­sible to the gen­er­al ca­pa­city of read­ers.
However, if my own ig­nor­ance in sea af­fairs shall have led me to com­mit some mis­takes, I alone am an­swer­able for them.
And if any trav­el­ler hath a curi­os­ity to see the whole work at large,
as it came from the hands of the au­thor, I will be ready to grat­i­fy him.
As for any fur­ther par­tic­u­lars re­lat­ing to the au­thor, the read­er will re­ceive sat­is­fac­tion from the first pages of the book.
RICHARD SYMPSON.

A LETTER FROM CAPTAIN GULLIVER TO HIS COUSIN SYMPSON.

Written in the Year 1727.

I hope you will be ready to own pub­licly, whenev­er you shall be called to it,
that by your great and fre­quent ur­gency you pre­vailed on me to pub­lish a very loose and un­cor­rect ac­count of my travels,
with dir­ec­tions to hire some young gen­tle­man of either uni­versity to put them in or­der, and cor­rect the style,
as my cous­in Dampi­er did, by my ad­vice, in his book called “A Voy­age round the world.”
But I do not re­mem­ber I gave you power to con­sent that any thing should be omit­ted, and much less that any thing should be in­ser­ted;
there­fore, as to the lat­ter, I do here re­nounce every thing of that kind; par­tic­u­larly a para­graph about her majesty
Queen Anne, of most pi­ous and glor­i­ous memory; al­though I did rev­er­ence and es­teem her more than any of hu­man spe­cies.
But you, or your in­ter­pol­at­or, ought to have con­sidered, that it was not my in­clin­a­tion,
so was it not de­cent to praise any an­im­al of our com­pos­i­tion be­fore my mas­ter Houyh­nhnm: And be­sides, the fact was al­to­geth­er false;
for to my know­ledge, be­ing in Eng­land dur­ing some part of her majesty’s reign, she did gov­ern by a chief min­is­ter;
nay even by two suc­cess­ively, the first where­of was the lord of Godol­phin, and the second the lord of Ox­ford;
so that you have made me say the thing that was not.
Like­wise in the ac­count of the academy of pro­ject­ors,
and sev­er­al pas­sages of my dis­course to my mas­ter Houyh­nhnm, you have either omit­ted some ma­ter­i­al cir­cum­stances,
or minced or changed them in such a man­ner, that I do hardly know my own work.
When I formerly hin­ted to you something of this in a let­ter, you were pleased to an­swer that you were afraid of giv­ing of­fence;
that people in power were very watch­ful over the press, and apt not only to in­ter­pret,
but to pun­ish every thing which looked like an in­nu­endo (as I think you call it).
But, pray how could that which I spoke so many years ago, and at about five thou­sand leagues dis­tance,
in an­oth­er reign, be ap­plied to any of the Ya­hoos, who now are said to gov­ern the herd;
es­pe­cially at a time when I little thought, or feared, the un­hap­pi­ness of liv­ing un­der them?
Have not I the most reas­on to com­plain, when I see these very Ya­hoos car­ried by Houyh­nhnms in a vehicle,
as if they were brutes, and those the ra­tion­al creatures?
And in­deed to avoid so mon­strous and de­test­able a sight was one prin­cip­al motive of my re­tire­ment hith­er.
Thus much I thought prop­er to tell you in re­la­tion to your­self, and to the trust I re­posed in you.
I do, in the next place, com­plain of my own great want of judg­ment,
in be­ing pre­vailed upon by the en­treat­ies and false reas­on­ing of you and some oth­ers, very much against my own opin­ion,
to suf­fer my travels to be pub­lished.
Pray bring to your mind how of­ten I de­sired you to con­sider, when you in­sisted on the motive of pub­lic good,
that the Ya­hoos were a spe­cies of an­im­als ut­terly in­cap­able of amend­ment by pre­cept or ex­ample: and so it has proved;
for, in­stead of see­ing a full stop put to all ab­uses and cor­rup­tions, at least in this little is­land, as I had reas­on to ex­pect;
be­hold, after above six months warn­ing, I can­not learn that my book has pro­duced one single ef­fect ac­cord­ing to my in­ten­tions.
I de­sired you would let me know, by a let­ter, when party and fac­tion were ex­tin­guished; judges learned and up­right;
plead­ers hon­est and mod­est, with some tinc­ture of com­mon sense, and Smith­field blaz­ing with pyr­am­ids of law books;
the young no­bil­ity’s edu­ca­tion en­tirely changed; the phys­i­cians ban­ished;
the fe­male Ya­hoos abound­ing in vir­tue, hon­our, truth, and good sense;
courts and levees of great min­is­ters thor­oughly weeded and swept; wit, mer­it, and learn­ing re­war­ded;
all dis­gracers of the press in prose and verse con­demned to eat noth­ing
but their own cot­ton, and quench their thirst with their own ink.
These, and a thou­sand oth­er re­form­a­tions, I firmly coun­ted upon by your en­cour­age­ment;
as in­deed they were plainly de­du­cible from the pre­cepts de­livered in my book.
And it must be owned, that sev­en months were a suf­fi­cient time to cor­rect every vice
and folly to which Ya­hoos are sub­ject, if their natures had been cap­able of the least dis­pos­i­tion to vir­tue or wis­dom.
Yet, so far have you been from an­swer­ing my ex­pect­a­tion in any of your let­ters;
that on the con­trary you are load­ing our car­ri­er every week with li­bels, and keys, and re­flec­tions, and mem­oirs, and second parts;
wherein I see my­self ac­cused of re­flect­ing upon great state folk; of de­grad­ing hu­man nature
(for so they have still the con­fid­ence to style it), and of ab­us­ing the fe­male sex.
I find like­wise that the writers of those bundles are not agreed among them­selves;
for some of them will not al­low me to be the au­thor of my own travels;
and oth­ers make me au­thor of books to which I am wholly a stranger.
I find like­wise that your print­er has been so care­less
as to con­found the times, and mis­take the dates, of my sev­er­al voy­ages and re­turns;
neither as­sign­ing the true year, nor the true month, nor day of the month:
and I hear the ori­gin­al manuscript is all des­troyed since the pub­lic­a­tion of my book;
neither have I any copy left: however, I have sent you some cor­rec­tions, which you may in­sert,
if ever there should be a second edi­tion: and yet I can­not stand to them;
but shall leave that mat­ter to my ju­di­cious and can­did read­ers to ad­just it as they please.
I hear some of our sea Ya­hoos find fault with my sea-lan­guage, as not prop­er in many parts, nor now in use. I can­not help it.
In my first voy­ages, while I was young, I was in­struc­ted by the old­est mar­iners, and learned to speak as they did.
But I have since found that the sea Ya­hoos are apt, like the land ones,
to be­come new-fangled in their words, which the lat­ter change every year; in­somuch,
as I re­mem­ber upon each re­turn to my own coun­try their old dia­lect was so altered, that I could hardly un­der­stand the new.
And I ob­serve, when any Ya­hoo comes from Lon­don out of curi­os­ity to vis­it me at my house,
we neither of us are able to de­liv­er our con­cep­tions in a man­ner in­tel­li­gible to the oth­er.
If the cen­sure of the Ya­hoos could any way af­fect me, I should have great reas­on to com­plain,
that some of them are so bold as to think my book of travels a mere fic­tion out of mine own brain,
and have gone so far as to drop hints, that the Houyh­nhnms and Ya­hoos have no more ex­ist­ence than the in­hab­it­ants of Uto­pia.
In­deed I must con­fess, that as to the people of Lil­li­put, Brobd­in­grag
(for so the word should have been spelt, and not er­ro­neously Brobd­ing­nag),
and Laputa, I have nev­er yet heard of any Ya­hoo so pre­sump­tu­ous as to dis­pute their be­ing, or the facts I have re­lated con­cern­ing them;
be­cause the truth im­me­di­ately strikes every read­er with con­vic­tion.
And is there less prob­ab­il­ity in my ac­count of the Houyh­nhnms or Ya­hoos,
when it is mani­fest as to the lat­ter, there are so many thou­sands even in this coun­try,
who only dif­fer from their broth­er brutes in Houyh­nhnm­land, be­cause they use a sort of jab­ber, and do not go na­ked?
I wrote for their amend­ment, and not their ap­prob­a­tion.
The united praise of the whole race would be of less con­sequence to me,
than the neigh­ing of those two de­gen­er­ate Houyh­nhnms I keep in my stable; be­cause from these,
de­gen­er­ate as they are, I still im­prove in some vir­tues without any mix­ture of vice.
Do these miser­able an­im­als pre­sume to think, that I am so de­gen­er­ated as to de­fend my vera­city?
Ya­hoo as I am, it is well known through all Houyh­nhnm­land,
that, by the in­struc­tions and ex­ample of my il­lus­tri­ous mas­ter, I was able in the com­pass of two years
(al­though I con­fess with the ut­most dif­fi­culty)
to re­move that in­fernal habit of ly­ing, shuff­ling, de­ceiv­ing, and equi­voc­at­ing,
so deeply rooted in the very souls of all my spe­cies; es­pe­cially the Europeans.
I have oth­er com­plaints to make upon this vex­a­tious oc­ca­sion; but I for­bear troub­ling my­self or you any fur­ther.
I must freely con­fess, that since my last re­turn, some cor­rup­tions of my Ya­hoo nature have re­vived
in me by con­vers­ing with a few of your spe­cies, and par­tic­u­larly those of my own fam­ily, by an un­avoid­able ne­ces­sity;
else I should nev­er have at­temp­ted so ab­surd a pro­ject as that of re­form­ing the Ya­hoo race in this king­dom:
But I have now done with all such vis­ion­ary schemes for ever.
April 2, 1727

Jonathan Swift
Gulliver’s Travels / Gullivers Reisen
Zweisprachige Ausgabe
Übersetzt von Franz Kottenkamp

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