"What I offer here is not a translation; that would be superfluous. Rather, [I offer] an attempt to bring closer to us a beautiful foreign tale, through reworking it as German poetry ... I have attempted to reach this goal of nationalizing [the poem] by making the episodes stand alone, but also by dressing [them] in class-appropriate German costume, excluding everything foreign which is only understandable to us by learned means and is not immediately [understandable] through the feelings, while still retaining the local color, insofar as it does not destroy the poetic impression, but seems to strengthen it."