The impression of unsophisticated oral narration was strengthened by the rarity of paragraph divisions, though that may also have been determined by the need to save paper (some improvements to the almanac that he desired proved too expensive). His punctuation was (by the standards of later German) unorthodox: his commas usually indicate pauses rather than boundaries between grammatical clauses as would be required by normal German usage, and even his full stops can seem strangely placed, marking sometimes a break as soon as a new idea is to be taken up rather than before it is introduced. His prose, it has been said, must be read with the ear, not the eye. The repetitions, the variation of tense and the

change of syntactical structure within a sentence are never overdone, but they too contribute to the impression that this is spontaneous oral narrative. Not all of these features have been consistently or precisely rendered in the translation. Use of the present tense in narrative, for instance, is not uncommon in spoken English, more especially among the uneducated, but in print nowadays it looks precious. And whereas traces of dialect are a normal feature of the German spoken by most social classes, in English dialect can too easily smack overmuch of quaintness. So something of Hebel’s sophisticated unsophisticatedness has to be lost in translation. But perhaps not too much. For it would need great changes indeed to alter the basic flavour of Hebel’s texts.

Much of that flavour derives from the presence of the author himself in his persona as the ‘Hausfreund’ (Family Friend). In the engraving on the title page of each almanac he stands in the centre of the picture, with the village church in the background, speaking to a dozen men and women carrying a scythe or a rake or a whip, one, the magistrate perhaps, in frock coat and knee breeches, a book in his hand. A child and a dog are listening too. This friend of the family gives good advice. He wishes others to share and benefit from his knowledge. But he also jokes and entertains. As he tells a story he anticipates questions from the audience, guesses their thoughts and keeps them guessing. Ignorant of the rules of nineteenth-century literary realism, he declares that the tale must proceed as he dictates. But Hebel had observed that the man in the street, or in the fields, did not want a diet of fairy-tales. So he gives date and place when reporting events from history, or establishes the location, as if he were telling of events that really happened, for items that are fictional. Occasionally he claims to have been present at the incident he relates – as in ‘The Fake Gem’ (p. 97) which, he says, took place in Strassburg where Hebel did in fact have good friends. He offers comments as he goes along (sometimes as Biblical quotations which he could expect his audience to recognize). He points out the moral in a brief prologue or, more often, in an epilogue accompanied by a wag of the finger – and sometimes a wink - and the catchword ‘Merke!’ (‘Note this’or ‘Remember!’). His readers, he knew, were practical people who wanted something with a message, but they also had minds of their own and were keen to use them – so sometimes they were left to work out the moral for themselves. The Hausfreund confesses why a certain story moves him, but puts the more gushing speeches on the marvellous beneficence of nature and God’s creation in the mouth of his right-hand man or assistant (‘der Adjunk’, a friend in Karlsruhe – the ‘mother-in-law’ who also appears was Henriette Hendel, an actress to whom the bachelor Hebel lost his heart in 1808). He addresses the reader as reader, not listener, but this does not necessarily destroy the illusion that oral communication is involved. The modern reader must therefore be aware that he has to adopt the right tone and to pace the story right if he is to satisfy himself as ‘listener’. In many cases the reader of the Hausfreund in Hebel’s time would be reading aloud to family or friends. The fact that he was then standing in for the Family Friend could give a special twist to Hebel’s phrase ‘der geneigte Leser versteht’s’ (the good or kind reader will understand). But in any case the narrator can always assume that his readers or listeners are no fools and that he has not spoken above their heads.