Butler, James A. “William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ‘Emma,’ and a German Translation in the Alfoxden Notebook.” Studies in Romanticism 36.2 (Summer, 1997): 157–71.
“The Alfoxden Notebook, now at the Wordsworth Library in Grasmere, is one of the central documents of the English Romantic Movement, for in that Notebook, William Wordsworth, early in 1798, developed his conceptions of the union and harmony of all things, of the mind’s creative interplay with the natural world. Of the many passages scholars have pored over in the Alfoxden Notebook, one text, though it has received scant attention, sheds light on William and his sister Dorothy in their crisis year of 1802. Within the Notebook appears (in a German script which makes it difficult to identify the writer by penmanship) a translation of William’s ‘The Two April Mornings,’ headed ‘Die zwey Aprilmorgens.’ But careful examination of this hitherto-unpublished translation shows Dorothy Wordsworth to have written the work early in 1802, shortly after William and Mary Hutchinson decided to wed. Dorothy’s selection of this poem to translate not only illuminates her emotional state in 1802 but also the complex interrelationships of works mentioning ‘Emma’ (William’s name for Dorothy in his poetry) written in 1798, 1800, and 1802” (p. 157).
Dorothy Wordsworth 