Anonymous English Translator

The English version beginning Fairest Lord Jesus first appeared anonymously in Richard Storrs Willis’s Church Chorals and Choir Studies, published in New York in 1850. Willis printed German and English texts together, but he did not identify the translator. Later hymnals often continued to print the first three English stanzas without a translator’s name.

Some hymnological discussions have suggested that Henry Ward Beecher or another editor connected with mid-nineteenth-century American hymnody may have influenced the translation, but the evidence is not sufficient to assign authorship confidently. The responsible attribution therefore remains anonymous. This translation should also be distinguished from Joseph Augustus Seiss’s separate English version of 1873, from which many modern hymnals borrow an additional concluding stanza.