RRP: £10.95
BINDING: Paperback
PUBLISHED: 1996
ISBN: 9780946162581
PAGES: 192
Dual text
Heinrich Heine
Deutschland: A Winter's Tale
Translated from the German and edited by T. J. Reed
Dual text
Written four years before the 1848 Revolution, Heine’s Deutschland is a brilliantly funny read. In this ‘verse travelogue’ Heine comments on the homeland he sees again after years of exile. Europe’s wittiest poet bull’s-eyes his targets – bourgeois lethargy, rampant Prussianism, phoney medievalism, German idealist philosophy – and the idea that the value system of the German middle class has helped to maintain social injustice and political oppression.
T. J. Reed’s translation is the only English version to shape up to Heine’s outrageous rhymes and rhythms. This reissue following the reunification of Germany in 1990 adds facing German text and updates the introduction and endnotes in the perspective of a Germany once more reconstituted.
‘That rare phenomenon, ironic political verse, light in manner but not in matter.’ – D. J. Enright, Observer
‘Deutschland is brilliantly entertaining and retains its relevance for the modern reader through its classic consideration of the fraught relationship between revolutionary ideals and their practical consequences … T. J. Reed reproduces the comic associations created by rhyme and succeeds beautifully in recreating the pointed, epigrammatic effect of the terse rhythm. This bilingual edition is a fitting tribute to Heine – in Reed’s memorable phrase – that “passionate defender and outrageous taker of liberties”.’ – Anita Bunyan, Jewish Chronicle
‘Reed’s version is brilliantly successful, at times achieving what one might have thought impossible: English verse as witty and precise as the original.’ – Forum for Modern Language Studies
HEINRICH HEINE was born in 1797 in the Catholic Rhineland, the poor relation of a wealthy Jewish family. After attending the universities of Bonn, Göttingen and Berlin he was unable to settle to any suitable employment and uneasy under the repressive German political order in the Metternich era; to these years belong four volumes of travel sketches. Attracted by the ideals of the July Revolution, he moved to Paris, where he stayed for the rest of his life, interpreting German life and letters to the French and French politics to the Germans; in Germany his writings were officially branded as subversive. The first of his collections of verse, Book of Songs (1827), established his reputation as a lyric poet and was to provide a number of composers, notably Schumann, with song-texts. He continued to write almost to the end of his life, when he produced some of his finest poetry. He died, after eight years of a painful paralytic illness, in 1856.