HEINE IN TRANSLATION
THIS is an impressive volume, .representing an enormous labour which seems, on the whole, to have been worth while. Mr. Untermeyer is well aware that the essential quiddity of Heine is untranslatable ; yet those who cannot read German know where to find that quality - elsewhere--in Elizabethan
lyrics, in the music of Schumann, and in the poetry of A. E.
–Nevertheless; Trvery venous,' and translation not quite powerless to render some of it with a fair show of success. English readers will not in future be able to complain that the attempt has not been heroically made.
The five hundred odd poems contained in this volume give a
very fair idea of the poet's whole oniput, as well as bearing witness to Mr. Untenneyer's aciroitncis as a translator. Here are no masterpieces of interpretation to compare with, say, Stefan George's rendering of Shakespeare's konnets ; but the general level is remarkably high. The difficult problem of translating the German " Du " is, for the most part, success- ffilly circumvented ; and elsewhere the various colloquialisms- With which Heine achieved many of his most touching effects are put across.without bathos.
Awkwardnesses, however, occur rather frequently. The attempt to preserve the original metre sometimes results in the lines being clumsily accented on the weak syllables—a fault which ruins the musical flow and the harmony of the quatrain.
Example : " She grows frightened and she blushes As she sees his beauty bare— _ While the god of love awakens, And his pinions beat the air." , /n most cases Mr. Untenneyer-is admirably faithful to the exact sense of the original, but occasionally he seems to me to take quite unjustifiable liberties with the meaning, as in his translation of Du bin wie eine Blume : " Child, you are like.a.ilower; So' sweet and pure and fair ; I look at you, and sadness Touches me with a prayer."
where the word " prayer " refers to nothing but the translator's desire to find a rhyme for " fair," at the expense of the line's actual meaning (" creeps into my heart ").
But on occasions when Heine is at his worst, as in the intolerably mawkish Deine weissen Lilienfinger, Mr. Untermeyer actually seems to me to improve on the original, skilfully draining off the surplus sugar- that makes those verses suitable
for inclusion in a cracker. - • - On the whole, as one would expect, - the translator -is most successful in dealing with the longer poems in ballad form, ands some of the satirical pieces, though here the difficulty of translat- ing the puns in the original proved insurmountable. The long Gothic romance, Ich keen von meiner Herrin Haus, is perhaps the most remarkable of Mr. Untermeyer's achievements in the ballad genre ; but there are many others. And the volume has a further merit : to browse through it is to receive a very curious, private light on European history in the nineteenth
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