Dearest friend,
In a week or so I shall send you a very long article of mine about Lohengrin. If personal reasons of your own do not prevent it, it will appear in Paris in the course of October. You are sufficiently acquainted with the habits of the Paris press to know how reluctantly it admits the entire and absolute eulogium of a work by a foreign composer, especially while he is still living. In spite of this, I shall try to overcome this great obstacle, for I make it a point of honour to publish my opinion of your work; and if you were fairly satisfied with my article, you might perhaps give me a pleasure which would not cost you more than a day or two of tedium. This would be to make a translation, revised, corrected, augmented, and authenticated, which, by the help of your and my friends, could be inserted in two or three numbers of the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung or the journal of Brockhaus, signed with my name.
If you should prefer to have it printed separately as a little pamphlet by Weber, of Leipzig, I should not object; and if you would say a word to Weber, I feel convinced that he would willingly undertake it. But before all you must be acquainted with my article, and tell me very frankly whether or not you would like to have it published in Germany. In France I will manage it a little sooner or a little later, but in case of a German publication I should make it an absolute condition that you undertook the trouble of translating it and of having it copied under your eyes, so that I should not be charged with the blunders of the translator, etc., etc. You will see that the style is carefully French, and it would therefore be very important not to destroy the nuances of sentiment and thought in their passage to another language.
Source: Project Gutenberg eBook #3835, Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt — Volume 1, No. 45