Steller’s observations in the role of social scientist are a particularly memorable aspect of the “Description of Irkutsk.” He deplores the unfair treatment of poor people; appreciates the Cossacks’ superb choice of the absolutely best place to found this town; and admires, rather idealistically, the hardworking promyshlenniks1 and their fishing cooperative in which everything is harmoniously shared. Much of the journal, especially beginning with the trip down the Lena River during breakup, relates an arduous trek with descriptions of rugged landscapes and their flora. Stejneger, who in his 1936 biography of Steller lamented the loss of this journal, would indeed have found in it “the wonderful commentary . . . on men and conditions as they prevailed during the time of the Second Kamchatka Expedition” that he assumed would be there.2 From the wealth of letters and other documents we consulted in both Quellen volumes, we have added a sample of a Schnurbuch (account ledger; 3:317–21) and a letter to Schumacher (3:212–14) as appendices (B and C) to further illustrate how the expedition’s byzantine administrative system affected Steller’s work.
Frontis. Though no portrait of Georg Wilhelm Steller is known to exist, several artists have depicted him as they imagined him to look. In our estimation this statue by Russian sculptor Ilya Vyuev, entitled Infinitely Large in the Infinitely Small (2011), most successfully captures Steller’s unassuming appearance and his intense interest in scientific research. This work in plaster (70 centimeters) was initially presented in Moscow in 2011. In 2016, at the request of the Komandorskiy Nature Reserve, a full-scale Steller bronze monument (2.2 meters) was made based on the initial sculpture. The plan is to place this monument on Bering Island. Photo reprinted with permission of the artist.
Translating Steller’s texts has been its own arduous trek through the eighteenth-century linguistic landscape. First of all, these texts are essentially Steller’s unrevised field notes, published in what the Germans call a textkritische Ausgabe, recording Steller’s notes just as he wrote them but also carefully identifying lacunae and substitutions due to the condition of the manuscript. Eighteenth-century written German was not standardized with respect to spelling, grammar, or punctuation; helping verbs were frequently omitted, and the same word might be spelled three different ways on the same page. Steller’s use of punctuation is totally erratic, so deciphering which words constituted a complete sentence became something of a guessing game. It is safe to assume that, had he lived and been given permission to publish his work, Steller himself would have eliminated many of the confusing aspects of the manuscripts. He suggests as much in his Beasts of the Sea, where he invites readers who object to the earthen vessel containing his written porridge to pour it into a gold or silver urn.3 He was definitely sensitive to the shortcomings in his writing caused by lack of time, as evidenced in his letters—for example, the one to Schumacher (see appendix C). Switching number or tense; omitting nouns, pronouns, and articles; not putting events in a logical sequence—for example, observing that he drowned his beard in a lake before writing that he was getting a shave—are all examples of the haste with which he had to work much of the time and his superactive mind outracing his pen.
Despite his unpolished writing, his personal style comes through. He was fond of repetition, often piling one adjective on another—lovely, beautiful, pleasant—or using two nouns meaning the same thing—the rich and well-to-do. He had a wicked sense of understated humor—for example, ironically labeling it a misfortune that he and Aleksei “just barely escaped a watery grave” (114–15). He delighted in playing with language, as when he described himself as the meat in a muck soup after falling into a boggy hole with his horse or cited the need to let the horses “ausruhen, ausfressen und ausheilen” or “rest up, fill up, and pick up their health” (139). However, using Berg, mountain, interchangeably with Gebirge, mountain range, seemed out of character for a scientist. Here we tried to be more precise.
Steller had been schooled in Latin. It was the lingua franca among scholars; he read, wrote, and spoke it fluently. Not surprisingly, he used it almost exclusively in describing plants and minerals. Since he was traveling through Russia, he used Russian terms, writing them down as he heard them, not necessarily how they were actually spelled, his Russian apparently having been learned by ear. Using many French words was common in the eighteenth century, and Steller did that too. Quite a few words in all of these languages, including Steller’s native German, are obsolete now, sending us to Hintzsche’s Anmerkungen or the Grimm Brothers’ Deutsches Wörterbuch.
Hintzsche transcribed the text painstakingly while supplying ample notes with explanations of outdated German words and expressions, corrections and translations of Russian words and phrases, translations of Latin and French words and phrases, geographic and historical explanations, and identification of people as well as a glossary of Russian terms. Wherever Hintzsche’s notes helped, we used them, citing them as WH, Anm. However, he did not edit the text to clarify the meaning. That has been left to us.
We have had two competing goals. We wanted to faithfully convey the meaning that Steller intended. At the same time, we wanted to produce a translation that would be read with pleasure, without the stumbling blocks of antiquated and bureaucratic language and a host of foreign words and expressions or explanatory notes. Our process of translating was often like walking a knife-edged ridge, trying, on the one side, not to fall into misrepresenting Steller with our coherent, flowing prose and, on the other, not to leave readers confused or bored. We have of course standardized the spelling and the punctuation and supplied helping verbs that Steller omitted as well as pronouns, articles, nouns, and occasionally phrases to avoid ambiguity. Some of his repetitions we have retained; some we have shortened. We have usually reversed illogical sequences, and we have tried to match his creative use of language or at least note it. We have opted, wherever possible, for words most likely used in Steller’s time, translating, for example, Branntwein consistently as brandy, while other translators or commentators use vodka or whiskey. To accurately reflect the range of Steller’s language use from high society to barnyard, we have translated terms not used in polite society accordingly. We have used contractions to reflect Steller’s informal language. We have retained the Russian terms for which there are no ready equivalents in English—for example, designations of officials and places—and kept the Russian for which Steller himself supplies the translation, correcting the spelling and transliterating it using the Modified Library of Congress system. We have taken the liberty of retaining the anglicized sluzhiv/sluzhivs, used also by Stejneger, in place of the Russian sluzhivii and sluzhivye liudi because Steller himself almost always Germanized the word; we consider servitor/s, the translation used by other translators and scholars, stilted and alien to contemporary American English.4 We retain the spellings of Russian words as found in American dictionaries (e.g., ukase and yurt) and of cities as found in standard American atlases (e.g., Yeniseysk and Yakutsk). We have also retained the old adjective ending -oi (e.g., boyarskoi and Olekminskoi) typically used in Steller’s time where today -ii is used. We italicize foreign words only the first time we use them. We have relied on Hintzsche’s notes and Jäger’s generous help in translating the Latin.
Language reflects society, and eighteenth-century Europe stood on ceremony; class distinctions and rank mattered greatly, but how much so was not immediately apparent to us. We were rather puzzled that Steller used two different words for Diener, servant, calling Herr Berckhan’s a Knecht, today strictly meaning a farm laborer.