1904 - 1982 Translator (sts. 2-3) of "O Jesus So Sweet, O Jesus So Mild" in Lutheran Service Book Frieda Emilie Priebbenow (née Pietsch) was born September 13, 1904, in Murtoa, Victoria, Australia, to Paul Johannes Pietsch and Anna Elizabeth Pietsch (née Zadow). One of nine children, she grew up on a farm called Pleasant View in the Wimmera District of Victoria, in Kewell North. She attended the Lutheran Day School. In Lutheran school, she studied the Holy Bible and grew to love studying scripture.
In 1928, she moved with her brother, an ordained Lutheran pastor, to St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Greenwood, Queensland, where she served as his housekeeper. She met a farmer at her brother’s church, Johann (John) Hermann Priebbenow. He was the organist at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Greenwood.
Frieda’s two hymn translations were published in The Australian Lutheran, the periodical of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod in Australia (later Evangelical Lutheran Church of Australia). “O Jesus so sweet, O Jesus so mild,” her translation of “O Jesulein süss, O Jesulein mild” (LSB 546), was printed in the December 20, 1932, issue. Her second hymn translation, a work by Friedrich Samuel Dreger (1798-1859) “Mein Schifflein geht behende” appeared as a five-stanza hymn beginning “My ship is deftly wending” in the February 17, 1933, issue. Because these hymns were published before she married, they appear under her maiden name. Her sons, Clarence and Harold, in emails and a letter dated February 3, 2009, and February 8, 2009, to the editor, Peter Reske, for the Lutheran Service Book Companion to the Hymns (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, c2019) said that their mother had translated other hymns from German, but these have not been identified. Frieda Priebbenow died on July 20, 1982.
Jean Katherine Neuhauser Baue (With great appreciation to Peter Reske; Source: Lutheran Service Book Companion to the Hymns, volume 2, p. 578)
Frieda Pietsch
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