The poems of Heine; Complete. Heinrich Heine
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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
A NEW edition of this work having been called for, owing to the first edition having been for some time out of print, I have taken advantage of the opportunity to add translations of a remarkable collection of Poems by Heine, published for the first time since the appearance of my work in 1859. They consist of as many as twelve hundred lines, described partly as “Early Poems,” which will be found at the beginning of the volume, and partly as “Posthumous Poems,” which are placed at the end. The metres of the original have been again retained throughout.
Various errors discovered by me in the first edition have now been corrected; and it only remains for me to express my thanks for the kind manner in which the critical and the general public, both in England and abroad, have received the work, and for the indulgence extended by them to its many imperfections.
E. A. B.
PREFACE.
IT may perhaps be thought that I exhibit something of the brazen-facedness of a hardened offender in venturing once more (but, I hope, for the last time) to present myself to the public in the guise of a translator—and, what is more, a translator of a great poet. The favourable reception, however, that my previous translations of the Poems of Schiller and Goethe have met with at the hands of the public, may possibly be admitted as some excuse for this new attempt to make that public acquainted with the works of a third great German minstrel. Comparatively little known and little appreciated in England, the name of Heine is in Germany familiar as a household word; and while, on the one hand, many of his charming minor poems have become dear to the hearts of thousands and tens of thousands of his fellow-countrymen, and are sung alike in the palace and the cottage, in the country and the town, on the other his sterner works have done much to influence the political and religious tendencies of the modern German school.
Having prefixed to this Volume a brief memoir of Heine, accompanied by a few observations on his various works and their distinguishing characteristics, I will here confine myself to stating that I have adhered with the utmost strictness to the principles laid down by me for my guidance in the case of the previous translations attempted by me—those principles being (1) As close and literal an adherence to the original as is consistent with good English and with poetry, and (2) the preservation throughout the work of the original metres, of which Heine presents an almost unprecedented variety. I have, on the occasion of my former publications, fully explained my reasons for adopting this course, and will not weary the reader with repeating them. I have sufficient evidence before me of the approval of the public in this respect to induce me to frame my translation of Heine’s Poems on the same model.
In addition to thus preserving both the language and the metre of the original, I have in one other respect endeavoured to reproduce my author precisely as I found him, and that is in the important particular of completeness. There are doubtless many poems written by Heine that one could wish had never been written, and that one would willingly refrain from translating. But the omission of these would hide from the reader some of Heine’s chief peculiarities, and would tend to give him an incomplete if not incorrect notion of what the poet was. A translator no more assumes the responsibility of his author’s words than a faithful Editor does, and he goes beyond his province if he omits whatever does not happen to agree with his own notions.
In claiming for the present work (extending over more than 20,000 verses) the abstract merits of literalness, completeness, and rigid adherence to the metrical peculiarities of the original, it is very far from my intention to claim any credit for the manner in which I have executed that difficult task, or to pretend that I have been successful in it. That is a question for the reader alone to decide. The credit of conscientiousness and close application in the matter is all that I would venture to assert for myself. All beyond is left exclusively to the candid, and, I would fain hope, generous, appreciation of those whom I now voluntarily constitute my judges.
HEINRICH HEINE.
ALTHOUGH little more than three years have elapsed since Heinrich Heine was first numbered amongst the dead, his name has long been enrolled in the lists of fame. Even during his lifetime he had the good fortune—and, in a poet, the most unusual good fortune—of being generally accepted as a Representative Man, and of passing as the National Bard of Young Germany. Although perhaps scarcely entitled to rank with Goethe and Schiller in the very highest order of poets, the name of Heine will assuredly always occupy a prominent place amongst the minstrels not only of Germany, but of the world.
It is only recently that his works have been for the first time published in an absolutely complete form, the poetry extending over more than two of the six volumes of which they consist. Universally known and read in his native land, and highly popular in France, which was for so many years his adopted country, the works of Heine are to the generality of Englishmen (as stated in the Preface) almost entirely unknown. As the present volume is, as far as I am aware, the only attempt that has been made to bring the far-famed poems of Heine in their integrity before the English reader,[1] it seems desirable to preface it by a brief sketch of his life, so that in seeing what Heine is as a poet, we may be able to form some idea as to who he was as a man. One who has been compared in turns to Aristophanes, Rabelais, Burns, Cervantes, Sterne, Jean Paul, Voltaire, Swift, Byron, and Béranger (and to all these has he been likened), can be of no common stamp. The discrepancies both as to facts and dates that occur between the various biographies of Heine are, however,