★★★★☆ Flowers and nightingales and scorn

Selected Verse

Heinrich Heine, Peter Branscombe

I find that I cannot read a book of poetry as I would a novel: starting at the beginning and reading one page after another continuously until the end. Poetry requires a little time to sink in. Therefore it is my practice each morning to read a page or two of poetry. For prolific poets like Heinrich Heine I choose books of selected poetry. Thus I hope to be able to read a poet's best work in a few months. From 20-Sep-2023 to 21-Dec-2023 I thus worked my way through Selected Verse, typically two pages each morning, except when the poems were longer than that.

The layout is like this: at the top of each page we have the verses in German. Underneath, in smaller type, is an English prose translation. If your native language is German the English translation is a waste of space -- if you read English but not German this is not the book for you -- Heine in English prose is not what anyone wants to read. It is, however, the ideal format for someone like me who understands German fairly well, but is not a native speaker, and therefore might miss some of Heine's subtleties if reading only in German. There is also a useful introduction (in English) by Peter Branscombe -- mostly a short biography of Heine.

Heine is, I think, most famous for his love poetry. I was not, to be honest, all that impressed by it. It seemed conventional to me, all flowers and nightingales and infantilization of women. (It did, however, inspire me to find a YouTube recording of the song of a nightingale, which I, as an American, have never heard in the wild.)

But Heine contains multitudes. His later poetry has more bite. As a lover of fantasy, I particularly enjoyed his poems based on heroic and religious myth. These often come with a sharp stab of scorn. For instance, in "Adam der Erste" we have this pointed criticism of Eden

Vermissen werde ich nimmermehr
Die paradiesischen Räume;
Das war kein wahres Paradies –
Es gab dort verbotene Bäume.

The English translation is

I shall certainly never miss the realms of Paradise; it wasn’t a true Paradise – there were forbidden trees there.

For its intended audience: German-readers whose first language is not German, this is an excellent, scholarly selection of Heine's breadth.

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