Songs of love & grief

the long version

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) is undoubtedly Germany's most significant poet of the nineteenth century, second in importance only to Goethe. Heine's poetry appeared in all major European languages and was immensely popular throughout the nineteenth century, but has been neglected by modern readers. Now the eminent translator Walter W. Arndt has rectified this situation by producing sparkling new translations of Heine's love poems. Although many of Heine's poems are deceptively simple on the surface, the multiple allusions, word plays, and shifts and breaks in diction and tone make them almost untranslatable. Arndt not only renders the meaning of the originals, but preserves the poems' rhyme schemes as well as their moods and multiple cultural resonances. Arndt captures both the simplicity of the Germanic folk song structure and the Romantic pathos and imagery that Heine both evokes and undermines, revealing the identification with and alienation from German culture expressed so poignantly in Heine's poetry. This bilingual edition includes an illuminating introduction by Heine scholar Jeffrey L. Sammons.