The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine: A Modern English Version

1052 Pages·1982·21.097 MB·English

by  Heinrich Heine, Hal Draper (Translator)

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The Complete Poems of
Heinrich Heine

The Cotnplete Poents of
Heinrich Heine
A Modern English Version
by Hal Draper
S uhrkallpl /Insel
Publishers Boston, Inc.
Copyright © 1982 by Hal Draper
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmit­
ted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Heine, Heinrich, 1797-1856.
The complete poems of Heinrich Heine.
Includes index.
1. Draper, Hal. II. Title.
PT2316.A4D7 1982 831'.7 81-8593
ISBN 3-518-03048-5 AACR2
Printed in the United States of America ISBN 3-518-03048-5
Distributed in the United Kingdom by Oxford University Press
ISBNO 19 815785 1
Photographs: Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University and the
Schiller Nationalmuseum.
To ANNE KRACIK
who introduced me to Heinrich Heine in 1936 ...
"If I were obliged, not to define poetry, but to name the
class of things to which it belongs, I should call it ... a
morbid secretion, like the pearl in the oyster."
-A. E. HOUSMAN
Weave a web of words around,
Let the tinkles chime;
Let the pretty phrases sound,
Push the rawness underground,
Make the thought sublime, profound,
Smooth its ache with rhyme.
Still, these songs, I know what's there
Buried in the pearl:
Cankering beneath the care
Lavished on the coat they bear,
Morbid motes of bright despair-
Take the songs, my girl,
Take them up and read with me,
Weep with me in vain.
Underneath the jeu d'esprit,
Lacing through the filigree,
Dulling through the luster, see
At its core the pain.
H. D.
-

CONTENTS
Foreword
IX
PART I. FIRST PERIOD, GERMANY 1812-1831 1
Book of Songs 3
Prefaces 3
Youthful Sorrows 10
Lyrical Intermezzo 51
The Homecoming 76
From The Harz Journey 123
The North Sea 131
Supplement to the Book of Songs 159
Tragedies 179
Almansor 179
William Ratcliff 238
Other Published Poems 273
Unpublished Poems 283
Juvenile and Miscellaneous Verse 293
PART II. MIDDLE PERIOD, PARIS 1831-1848 311
New Poems 313
New Spring 314
Sundry Women 330
Ballads 365
Olio 385
Poems for the Times 392
Supplement to New Poems 409
Atta Troll. A Summer Night's Dream 419
Germany. A Winter's Tale 481
Other Published Poems 537
Unpublished Poems 549
Topical Poems 549
Personal Poems 553
Miscellaneous Verse 559
Vlll CONTENTS
PART III. LAST PERIOD,
THE MATTRESS-GRAVE 1848-1856 561
Romancero 563
Book 1. Tales 563
Book 2. Lamentations 615
Lazarus 637
Book 3. Hebrew Melodies 651
Notes [by Heine] 689
Postscript to the Romancero 693
Poems of 1853 and 1854 699
Other Published Poems 741
Unpublished Poems 745
Bimini 745
Poems for the Times 764
Fables for the Times 771
People of the Times 786
The Retrospective Eros 797
Thanatos 806
Mathilde 815
The Mouche 819
APPENDICES 827
Explanatory Note 829
Short Fragments and Lost Verse 831
A Note on Heine's Translations 833
A Note on Apocryphal and Forged Poems 835
Notes & Varian ts 837
Part I. First Period 837
Part II. Middle Period 885
Part III. Last Period 943
Indexes 983
FOREWORD
In presenting Heinrich Heine's poetry to the English-speaking
public, I do not feel called on to supply an introduction to his life
and works as well. I think that a new reader should begin with a
direct response to the poems themselves. However, there are
certain remarks I want to make to introduce not Heine himself
but simply the present volume. I hope that it contributes to
altering Heine's image for the modern reader; and the present
moment appears to be propitious to this aim.
1
Heinrich Heine's place in world literature has a history of its own,
marked by wide up-and-down swings; the effort by Hitlerism to
erase his name altogether was only one episode in this story.
Somehow Heine has survived incomprehension and indifference
as well as prejudice-not only in Germany-and now it is good to
report that his reputation is beginning a new upsurge, perhaps its
greatest. In Heine's homeland, two institutes-one in West Ger­
many (Diisseldorf) and one in East Germany (Weimar)-are vying
to publish definitive editions of his complete works, bristling
with notes and scholarly Apparat. In German and English, exposi­
tions, essays and explications are pouring out like a lava stream,
which often petrifies everything in its path. It looks as if Heine
will be able to survive even this.
These vicissitudes may explain why it has been most of a
century since the whole body of his poetry has been attempted in
English. There have been three such efforts, only two of them by
single authors. These two can be treated summarily, despite the
convention requiring kindness to predecessors. The first was by
Edgar Alfred Bowring in 1858-only two years after the poet's
death-with the title The Poems of Heine-Complete. It is gray
on gray, or Heine seen through a dark brown glass. The third and
last one, Poetical Works, came in 1911 with a three-volume
massacre of Heine by John Payne, in pseudoarchaic English and
Germanic syntax.