Heine: Selected Verse (Penguin Classics)

Great poet, great poems, great intrduction and accompanying notes etc. But why would you ever publish a book for English readers where the English text is relegated to the footnotes?!This must be a great collection for someone who could just about manage the German but needs help, but I am just baffled as to why Penguin thought this layout was appropriate for those without any German but who still want to read Heine (which would be pretty much most people who buy the book). To oblige readers to read an entire book of poems in the footnote gutter of the pages is amazing!The poems though, of course, are excellent - I just wish there was a better presentation of them...

Not quite the book I expected, but it enabled me to find a quotation that I needed and thetranslation is well done. One to mull over on a dark winter evening when there is nothing but "footie" on the TV. Ted Jolliffe

Not the Heine as per the edition advertised (a newer one) nor what one expects of a so-called dual translation as this is laid out with the poetry in its original German dominating the page and then the translation, in microscopic font, at the foot of the page written out in a prose-format for some inexplicable and entirely inappropriate reason as if to render Heine into something very different from his superlative verse.A total sham and a waste of money!

I ordered the Heinrich Heine poetry, but once I opened the book, I discovered that only the cover was the Heine, and that the actual book inside was Henry de Monfreid's Hashish; A Smuggler's Tale - a nice book, but not the one I wanted!!! I couldn't really believe that Penguin could have cocked up so badly but anyhow...

There are almost no translations of Heine's poetry that aren't in unreadable rhymes. These are serviceable prose translations. I am using them to help me improve my German and painlessly acquire vocabulary. I don't know of a better Heine in English/D. that is better for this purpose.

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, in English translation isI 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.

For a bilingual reader, this collection is fascinating