Iambic Pentameter in German Shakespeare

In class as I was talking with Prof. Burton he mentioned looking at the use of iambic pentameter in German translations of Shakespeare.  I said that in the German translations they did not use prose much, that German did not lend itself well to iambic pentameter because in German the first syllable is stressed.  I must admit that I was wrong.  Partly.  German is stressed more on the first syllable, but that doesn't mean that German does not use iambic pentameter.  Especially Goethe and Schiller, after falling in love with Shakespeare, used iambic pentameter in their poetry.  

In the German translations that I have read, though, there is little prose.  They have chosen to translate the meaning of the English text, but with little concern for the poetry, for the meter.  So, I went looking for iambic pentameter in German translations of Shakespeare.  I chose a scene that I was very familiar with in English that is well-known for its use of iambic pentameter: the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, scene 2.  Then I went looking for German translations of Romeo und Julia, looking for iambic pentameter.   I had to look through three different translations before I found one, by August Wilhelm von Schlegel, that used iambic pentameter.  

Here is the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet in German.  I have bolded the accented syllable to show the iambic pentameter, and I have written the number of feet at the end of each line.  A + indicates that there is an extra syllable.

Romeo und Julia für das Ruhrpott

As I was thinking about Shakespeare and German translations the other day, I remembered a book that I found while I was on my mission Romeo und Julia: Ruhrpott, an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet taking place not only in Germany, but in this particular area of Germany known as the Ruhrgebiet or Ruhrpott.  I spent 18 months of my mission living in the Ruhrgebiet, so I really enjoy this book.


The Ruhrgebiet is the industrial heart of Germany, with coal mines, steel mills, foundries, etc.  There are a lot of large cities pretty close together, and as such industrial areas do, it attracts a lot of immigrants and foreigners.  Particularly in Germany, after WWII there was a large Guest-worker program bringing in workers from other countries since most of Germany's men did not return from the war.  


Because of the coal mines and steel mills as well as the many immigrants, the German spoken in the Ruhrgebiet is a little different from standard German.  Immigrants could not pronounce or conjugate German properly, and a lot of words get 'slanged' or shortened to facilitate work in the mines when you don't always have the luxury of time to be able to enunciate clearly.  


Not only is this book written in this dialect of German, which is mostly incomprehensible to anyone not familiar with the Ruhrgebiet, it is set in Wanne-Eickel, a town in the Ruhrgebiet and stars Rom-Jo Czervinski, whose father is Polish and runs the local Bratwurst stand, and Yülle Özmir,whose father is Turkish and runs the local Döner stand.  As members of different minority groups vying for the same market stall the two families have become rivals until .... well, you know the story.