Ach, liebe Ulrike, ich passe mich nicht unter die Menschen, es ist eine traurige Wahrheit, aber eine Wahrheit; u. wenn ich den Grund ohne Umschweif angeben soll, so ist es dieser: sie gefallen mir nicht.
Oh my dear Ulrike, I do not fit in with people, it is a sad truth but a truth nonetheless; and were I to give you a reason for it, in full candour, it would be this: I do not like them.
Letter to Ulrike v. Kleist, 5 February 1801, DKV IV 198
Today regarded as one of Germany’s most important writers, Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) led a short and troubled life that is remembered particularly for the spectacular double suicide in which it ended. A displaced aristocrat eschewing the financial security of a military or administrative career, he at once longed for and resented the more personable trappings of the bourgeoisie. Trying himself at law, science, economics and publishing, he was too restless and had too little business sense to pursue any of these to lasting success. Kleist’s literary ambitions initially lay with drama, and while plays such as Der zerbrochne Krug and Penthesilea are today regarded as masterpieces of German theatre, their critical failure at the time led him to focus on prose instead. The eight stories he published in his final years, first in journals and newspapers such as his own Phöbus and Berliner Abendblätter and then across two anthologies, testify to the social and personal pressures he had felt in life; most of these works have similarly become part of the German literary canon.
The first volume of the critical edition at hand mirrors Kleist’s first collection Erzählungen from 1810, and includes Michael Kohlhaas, Marquise von O.... and The Earthquake in Chili, while this second volume, mirroring Erzählungen. Zweiter Theil from 1811, includes The Betrothal in St Domingo, The Beggarwoman of Locarno, The Foundling, St Cecilia or The Power of Music and The Duel. The stories appear in German as well as English, with copious annotations and commentaries to bridge the considerable linguistic and historical distance between the 19th-c. Prussian writer and today’s Anglophone readers.
As described in greater detail in the Appendix, the translation of Kleist and his eccentric, pointedly German style into English presents an intriguing challenge. The prevailing trend in translation has been to bring the source work to the audience by ‘domesticating’ it, that is, making it more palatable and easier to read. In contrast to some of those who have translated Kleist before me, I have opted for the opposite approach—I ‘foreignise’ the translation, following the recommendations of Friedrich Schleiermacher and later Lawrence Venuti, and thus aim to bring the audience to Kleist rather than vice versa, preserving his stylistic idiosyncrasies as much as possible. In order to make sense of Kleist’s compulsively nested sentences, even German readers frequently need to read them repeatedly, which forms an important part of their reading experience; the twists and turns taken by the narrator are at least as interesting as the plots themselves. Rather than making Kleist as accessible as possible, then, I have aimed to offer a more investigative reading experience akin to the German one, and it is my hope that it will be similarly engaging.
For readers unaware of Kleist’s stylistic characteristics, it is difficult to distinguish what is the author’s and what is the translator’s doing, and a brief overview will therefore be instructive.1 Coming from drama, Kleist’s diction is infused with prosodic eloquence, and his narrative threads with action rather than novelistic reflection. Somewhat paradoxically, Kleist’s urgent style is also rather dry and factual, which is explained by his formative training as a legal clerk. The resulting syntactic contours are striking—long and complex sentences that are filled with detailed interjecting clauses, which themselves are frequently interjected. Because the interjections are often more interesting than their framing sentences, the resulting reading experience is rather disruptive, and the recounted facts and viewpoints constantly need to be revised—not unlike in the novels of Laurence Sterne.2 This disruptiveness is compounded by the frequent use of Latin and French grammaticisms, and the syntactic references of the sentences often stretch well beyond their ends, which can become rather confusing. At the same time, Kleist’s overexplicating use of conjunctions, another remnant of his legal writing—and as such also evoking his later admirer Franz Kafka—compels the reader to infer a sense of narrative causality even where this is lacking. Indeed, research frequently ascribes an “unreliable narrator” to Kleist; although the narrator’s tone suggests omniscience and impartiality, he frequently slips into adopting figural perspectives instead, and the resulting divergences can be jarring.
The typographical presentation of these dense, urgent and ever-shifting narratives further emphasises their idiosyncrasies. A distinct lack of paragraphing underlines their relentlessness, and the frequently non-standard punctuation, where colons may act as semi-colons and commas as breath markers—and where it should never be assumed that an opening speech mark is matched by a closing one—only serves to increase the impression of syntactic volatility.
While such matters of style are especially of interest to those engaging with the mechanics of Kleist’s prose and its translation, comprehension is also guided in this edition on an intertextual level. Kleist’s influences, the stories’ initial reception, and their parallels to contemporaneous works as well as to historical events and cultural developments are explored in the individual story commentaries, as are some of the more common interpretational angles. Kleist scholarship, especially during the 20th c., has enthusiastically set about uncovering the many possible subtexts and inferences within this body of work, and due to Kleist himself largely abstaining from any overt guidance, hermeneutics has proven to be a most fertile area of research. My own contributions in this regard are modest, and the interpretational perspectives presented within my commentaries are best understood as starting points for further study.
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I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the following: Günter Dunz-Wolff for contributing his source edition; Tim Mehigan for his foreword to Volume 1, and also his invaluable publishing encouragement; Richard Millington for his tireless feedback and corrections at every stage; Masja Horn and Pieter Boeschoten from Brill for their editorial support and for making this edition possible, and Piet van Poucke for suggesting Brill; Jean Anderson, Seán Allan, Tim Mehigan, Hansgerd Delbrück, and the anonymous reviewer and editorial board of Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik for their editing suggestions and corrections, and Hansgerd in particular for his unwavering and generous support; the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation and the School of Languages and Cultures at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington for funding and supporting my research; Charlotte Simmonds for encouraging me to pursue Kleist translation at this level; and finally my partner Sally, my children Ned and Remi and my mother Franziska for their help, their patience and their love.
Johannes Contag