Heinrich Heine’s oeuvre and reception raise important questions about the poetics and ethics of translation. Notable US poets, for example, have translated his well-known early poetry with very different motivations, including situating it in his biography as a German Jew (Emma Lazarus), reflecting his lyrical refinement (Ezra Pound), and radically communicating the ambiguities of his poems through homophonic translation (Charles Bernstein). Additionally, modern Hebrew poets (Nathan Alterman) and Jewish translators balanced their love of Heine with his apostasy and Germanness after the Shoah. Heine’s sprawling oeuvre, comprising poetry, essays, journalism, and voluminous correspondence, also begs the question of how much of a writer’s work must be translated, a question Charles Godfrey Leland repeatedly raises in his twenty-volume nineteenth-century translation of Heine’s works, which remains the most complete English translation to date. Moreover, Heine’s regular use of untranslated words and sentences from other languages (including French, English, Latin, and Hebrew) suggests he imagined his German as polyphonous and energized by the tension of translatability and untranslatability.

We are soliciting chapter proposals in a collected volume addressing these and other issues related to Heine and translation.   

Chapter abstracts may address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Heine’s reflections on translation and his reception of specific translations (Shakespeare, Cervantes, etc.)
• Heine’s practices of translation in a broad sense including his literary, philosophical, and political mediation between Germany and France
• Multilingualism in Heine’s writing
• Important moments in Heine’s international reception
• Poet-translators and Heine (Emma Lazarus, Mark Twain, Gérard de Nerval, Mikhail Lermontov, etc.)
• Case studies of translations of Heine’s best-known writings and comparative readings of translations of a single Heine text
• Interpretations of Heine in other media (music, illustration)
• Lives of Heine’s translators

Please send 300-word abstracts to Abigail Gillman (agillman@bu.edu) and Michael Swellander (mswellander(at)skidmore.edu) by June 1.