Therese Albertine Luise Robinson

Therese Albertine Luise von Jakob Robinson (26 January 1797 – 13 April 1870) was a German-American writer, linguist and translator, and second wife of biblical scholar Edward Robinson. She published under the pseudonym Talvj, an acronym derived from the initials of her birth name.

The author wrote a brief autobiographical preface in the Brockhausischen Conversations-Lexikon (1840).

Biography

Russian years She was born 1797 in Halle, to Ludwig Heinrich von Jakob, political writer and professor of philosophy. In 1806 or 1807, she accompanied her father's appointment to the University of Charkow, Russia (now Kharkiv, in Ukraine), where he served three (five?) years, during which she commenced the study of Slavic languages. She was deprived of formal education, though she had access to the university library at this time. her father was called to a position in St. Petersburg to aid in the revision of the criminal code,

Repatriation to Germany In 1816, the family moved back to Halle. Though she continued to write poetry and short stories, she was reluctant to publish them publicly in her own name.

Talvj was the pen name she invented, an acrostic formed from the initials of her maiden name (Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob) which she would use to sign her works thereafter, beginning with Psyche (1825), a collection of three short stories.

Serbian language and Goethe Her interest in the Serbian language was triggered by reading Jakob Grimm's criticism of the Serbian folk songs, and she delved into its study to obliterate her sorrow following the loss of a sister in 1823.

Marriage and coming to America In August 1828, she married the American theologian Edward Robinson. She had suffered the losses of both her mother and her father in and around this time, and it was an agonizing step for her to leave Germany. The couple remained in Europe another two years, sojourning in several countries.

In 1830 they reached the United States, settling in Andover, Massachusetts where awaited his professorship at the Andover Seminary. She worked in her personal capacity as a bridge between German and American culture, and assisted her husband's work in introducing German theology and thought through the press Biblical Repository, which her husband established 1831.

They moved to Boston in 1833, and she found herself in the intellectual circles around Karl Follen. The following year, she resumed her literary activity in her own right, first translating into German John Pickering's "Indian Languages of North America" printed in Encyclopedia Americana (1830–1831), which appeared as Über die Indianischen Sprachen Amerikas (1834). Pickering's work proposed a standard orthography for phonetically transcribing Native American words to remedy the fact that scholars from different nationalities adopted inconsistent romanization schemes. This system was based on the German pronunciation model. The same year, she wrote Historical View of the Slavic Languages published by her husband's Biblical Repository (Andover, 1834), The piece included a number of translated poems from Scandinavian languages, later included in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ed., The Poets and Poetry of Europe (1847). Her article was later published as a book in German, entitled Charakteristik der Volkslieder germanischen Nationen mit einer Uebersicht der Lieder aussereuropäischer Völkerschaften ('[Attempt at an Historical] Characterization of the Popular Songs of the German Nations, with a Review of the Songs of the Extra-European Races') (1840).

During this period came her book asserting proof that Ossianic poems were forgeries by the discoverer James Macpherson; it appeared under the title Die Unächtheit der Lieder Ossian's und des Macphersonschen Ossian's insbesondere or 'The spuriousness of Ossian's songs' (Leipzig, 1840).

New York 1840-1863 The literati who frequented their New York home were George Bancroft, William Cullen Bryant, Bayard Taylor, and Frederick Law Olmsted. She also struck up friendship with Washington Irving starting in 1846.

Other works in the German language were: Aus der Geschichte der ersten Ansiedelungen in den Vereinigten Staaten (Extracts from the history of the first settlement of the United States; 1845), Die Colonisation von Neu England (The colonization of New England; 1847), imperfectly translated into English by William Hazlitt, Jr., A collection of her tales, Gesammelte Novellen, with her biography by her daughter, was published in Leipzig (2 volumes, 1874).

Selected works anonymous

as Talvj

Band 1 and Band 2

- expanded (Translation) Walter Scott: Die Presbyterianer - Dritte Erzählungen meines Wirths. Zwickau 1826 (Translation) Walter Scott: Der schwarze Zwerg - Erste der Erzählungen meines Wirths. Zwickau 1826 (Translation)

Footnotes

Explanatory notes