Ehrengrab / Tomb of honour?

The crammer (Repetitor) Paul Schneider was given an Ehrengrab in Bonn. How to translate Ehrengrab? If someone died in the war, it could be a cenotaph or a war memorial, but Paul Schneider did not (did he die in his famous chair?). Der große Muret-Sanders and der kleine Muret-Sanders, two large bilingual dictionaries now published by Langenscheidt, offer tomb of honor. I tried various Google searches. The following search
“tomb +of honour” site:uk
produced only two identical quotes from ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’. And this one
“tomb +of honour”
(you can’t specify USA and I haven’t got very far with the Google Hacks book) consisted largely of identical quotes from the English version of the Mexican national anthem
‘For you the olive garlands! For them a memory of glory! For you a laurel of victory! For them a tomb of honor!’
Hmm. A lot of the other quotes are from outside the USA or refer to tombs outside the USA. (Translators use Google a lot but have to be careful that the terms they find are current in the right countries). The term may be OK, but perhaps we just don’t have tombs of hono(u)r.
My search led to a list of prominent persons buried in Zurich, with the following legend:

Legende: UB = Urnen-B-Mietgrab ° = Ehrengrab
UG = Urnen-Reihengrab °° = Schenkungsgrab
EG = Erdbestattungsgrab * = = Fotos der Grabstätten vorhanden
FG = Familiengrab
FUG = Familienurnengrab
GG = Gemeinschaftsgrab Krem. = Krematorium / Ni = Nische
U’hain = Urnenhain
Kirchh. = Kirchhof (Witikon)

More information to distinguish these types of grave I suspect is found in Daniel Foppa’s book.

I know Sir Thomas Browne wrote ‘Urn Burial’ a few centuries ago (‘The treasures of time lie high, in urns, coins, and monuments, scarce below the roots of some vegetables.’), but again, I associate it with Germany nowadays. If you get cremated in Germany, you finish up getting buried anyway. I must get down to making arrangements to avoid this – there is some scheme whereby you can have your ashes sent to the Netherlands. The trouble is, there always seems something better to do.

The definition of Ehrengrab in the 8-volume Duden German dictionary (that is not the newest) is ‘Ehrengrab[mal] Grab[mal] als Ehrenerweisung insbesondere für gefallene Soldaten’, which seems to mean it’s sometimes just the monument and sometimes the whole tomb. All this reminds me I have scarcely recovered from translating the monuments in Würzburg Cathedral, which after Mainz has the second-largest collection of such things in Germany: some of them are sepulchral slabs, some tombs or monuments.

cloister3w.jpg

Note to disLEXia: an article about crammers (in German) that inter alia cites a thesis with a photograph ‘Der Repetitor Schneider liest’, showing him raising both arms to heaven.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.