When I was a graduate student in the Stanford German department more than 30 years ago, I had to secure a special waiver from the registrar: I had taken more units than permitted by my fellowship. The reason for my transgression was Professor Gertrude Schuelke, PhD ’50, who every quarter led a devoted group of students through some ancient text in an obscure language such as Gothic, Old Saxon or Old Icelandic. I could not resist Dr. Schuelke’s classes and signed up for more than necessary or even rational.
Dr. Schuelke (1908-93), a veteran of the U.S. Navy’s World War II intelligence service, was the only tenured woman in the Stanford German department. In the late 1960s, she was simultaneously out-of-date and ahead of her time. Even her beautiful posture was, in a way, a relic of an earlier era.
Typically she would open a course by saying the class was too small for the room and that we would reconvene in her office. For the rest of the quarter, we would sit around a tiny table, reading out loud and translating slowly enough to savor the poetic refinements and gentle humor that would be evident only in the original language. It was an exercise in channeling voices from hundreds of years ago. I was always disappointed when a large group of students enrolled in one of her classes because it meant staying in the assigned room and diluting the experience.
While Schuelke had strong opinions, she did not impose them on her students. I remember spouting a view I had absorbed uncritically from Vladimir Nabokov that translations had to be pure, literal renderings of meaning without clumsy attempts at reproducing rhyme and meter. Rather than dispute the point, she showed me examples from her own distinguished private library of smooth poetic translations. She won the unspoken argument.
Once, when we were translating passages from a 4th-century Gothic text preserved in the 6th-century Codex Argenteus, she mentioned a noncirculating 1927 facsimile of this ancient manuscript in the library’s Special Collections. Before seismic reconstruction, rare books were housed in the Bender Room, accessed by an elevator with exposed cables that looked deeply worn and precariously twisted—but I would brave this in order to see the high-quality, color reproduction of the manuscript with its gold and silver lettering on purple parchment. Decades later, I made two pilgrimages to view the actual document in Uppsala, Sweden. When I recently published an article about the Codex Argenteus in the journal of the International Council on Archives, my mind drifted back to those sunny afternoons spent happily in Dr. Schuelke’s office deciphering ancient texts and absorbing her subtler perspectives on words from the past. And I stood up a bit straighter.
—ELENA S. DANIELSON, MA ’70, PhD ’75
