German Poetry translations into English I
These are modern English translations of poems by the German poets Hannah Arendt, Ingeborg Bachmann, Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim and Heinrich Heine.
Heinrich Heine
The Seas Have Their Pearls
by Heinrich Heine
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The seas have their pearls,
The heavens their stars;
But my heart, my heart,
My heart has its love!
The seas and the sky are immense;
Yet far
...
Continue reading...
Categories:
heine, death, heart, heaven, love,
Form: Free verse
Had a Big Heine Horn Haiku
when brain is tiny
he always was whiny
had a big heine
when on a campus
at times was a sourpuss
saw grass from the pampas
when saw grass we saw
which they had cut with a saw
shall be sent to a shah
was served with some slaw
was stuck with a straw
which was the last straw
combined with a claw
had been stuck
...
Continue reading...
Categories:
heine, allegory, analogy,
Form: Haiku
Critics Beware
Critics Beware!
Poets are vulnerable no less than anyone,
when fallen victim to outrageous critics.
As Shelley wrote, critics' darts struck Keats,
who blindly, cruelly, mocked 'Endymion.'
Lethal no less the heady potion fame.
Some drowned, took poison, died paupers or insane.
Yet poet-baiters must themselves take warning,
wrote Heine in his 'Winter Fairy Tale.'
Eternal lines, if barbed, outdo
...
Continue reading...
Categories:
heine, humanity, poets, strength,
Form: Elegy
Die Lorelei By Heinrich Heine - 1797-1856, Translated By T Wignesan
Die Lorelei by Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)- Translated by T. Wignesan
For Regina von Degenfeld at Waibstadt
-in respect and unending sufferance-
(Heine, a German Jewish lyrical and satiric poet, journalist and critic,
settled in Paris from 1831 where he married Eugénie Mirat, an unsophisticated shop-assistant which earned him ostracism and dispossession from his family and fellows, but he
...
Continue reading...
Categories:
heine, angst, fear, gothic, song,
Form: Quatrain
Heinrich Heine Revisited
I can clearly sense your utter despair of Der Matratzengruft*
As you valiantly carried on your poetic works to the very end.
This did not change your literary accomplishments well-known,
And your courage through the misery and morphine* is undeniable.
Your lyrical poetry speaks volumes among all of German literature,
And it was most marvelously set to music by the
...
Continue reading...
Categories:
heine, history, international, philosophy, poems,
Form: Narrative