{"id":57267,"date":"2023-06-03T15:21:38","date_gmt":"2023-06-03T19:21:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/?p=57267"},"modified":"2023-06-04T22:41:16","modified_gmt":"2023-06-05T02:41:16","slug":"such-a-great-read-the-poet-dying-heinrich-heines-last-years-in-paris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2023\/06\/such-a-great-read-the-poet-dying-heinrich-heines-last-years-in-paris.html","title":{"rendered":"Such a Great Read!<\/font>
The Poet Dying: Heinrich Heine’s Last Years in Paris<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If the opening of Ernst Pawel’s biographical study of Heinrich Heine doesn’t grab you, don’t bother to read on. But it if does, treat yourself to a great reading experience by getting hold of the book. It begins:<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

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“The clo<\/em><\/strong>tted mix of sanctimonious respect and unvarnished glee with which, in the summer of 1847, several German newspapers reported the death of Heinrich Heine reflected not only the wishful thinking of those who out of malice or gullibility concocted these premature obits but also [reflected] the exceedingly ambiguous position which Heine himself had occupied for so long in the world of both letters and politics. Indisputably Germany’s most popular poet since the death of Goethe, he was also a man who had consistently gone out of his way to provoke the hostility of friend and foe alike.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Heine’s genius for making enemies, intimately linked though it may have been to his poetic inspiration, proved a more than problematic gift throughout much of his life A polemicist of matchless skills, he parried attacks with a virulent overkill that in at least two celebrated instances backfired badly and gained his opponents far more sympathy than they deserved. He regularly tended, moreover, to let himself be carried away by an exuberant sense of either justice or irony, or both, to the point of lashing out wildly and wittily without much regard as to choice of targets. These lightning and often preemptive strikes, his decided preference for smiting other cheeks rather than turning his own, constituted a clear and, to his contemporaries, decided break with the age-old Jewish tradition of passivity in the face of aggression. Yet even without any deliberate effort on his part Heine would have had no trouble antagonizing a broad range of the German public across the entire political spectrum merely by virtue of being himself.”<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Poet Dying<\/em> includes a selection of Heine’s poems that runs to 80 or so pages, with the originals and the translations facing each other. Here’s an excerpt from one of the poems, a depiction of the Dutch slave trade that gives you a solid dose of Heine’s rich sarcasm.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Slave Ship<\/em>\n\nThe supercargo [captain] Mynheer van Koek\nSits in his cabin, stocktaking:\nHe's reckoning up the shipment's size\nAnd the probable profit he's making.\n\n\"The rubber is good, the pepper is good \u2014\nThree hundred barrels and sacks;\nThere's gold dust too, and ivory tusks \u2014\nBut the best goods are the blacks.\n\n\"At Senegal River I got dirt-cheap\nSix hundred Negroes in trade;\nTheir flesh is firm, their sinews strong,\nOf iron are they made. \n\n\"I got them in trade for beads of glass,\nSome brandy, and iron gear; \nIf only half of them live, I'll make \nEight hundred percent all clear.\n\n\"If I still have only three hundred blacks\nWhen we get to Rio d'Janeiro,\nI'll get a hundred ducats a head\nFrom the firm of Gonzales Perriero.\"\n\nThen suddenly Mynheer van Koek\nWas interrupted. In came\nThe little ship's surgeon through the door,\nVan der Smissen by name.\n\nHis figure's bony, thin and dry,\nHis nose with warts is flaring \u2014\n\"How goes it, sawbones,\" cried van Koek,\n\"How are my dear blacks faring?\"\n\nThe doctor acknowledged the question, and said:\n\"I came here to announce\nLast night the rate of death increased\nBy considerable amounts.\n\n\"The daily average death was two,\nBut seven died today,\nFour men, three women \u2014 I had the loss\nPut in the log straightaway.\n\n\"I had the corpses closely checked,\nFor these rogues are rascally\nAnd sometimes pretend to be dead so that\nThey'll get thrown into the sea.\n\n\"The chains were taken off the dead,\nAnd as I usually do,\nI had the bodies cast overboard.\nBefore the morning was through. \n\n\"At once a swarm of sharks shot up\nFrom deep down in the waters;\nThey like this black meat very much \u2014\nI consider them my boarders.\n\n\"They've followed in our wake since then\nAs the coastline faded from sight;\nThe beasts snuff at the corpses' scent\nWith a gourmand's appetite. \n\nThe poem continues for many more stanzas and concludes this way:<\/span>\n\nAt the foremast stands Mynheer van Koek\nAnd he folds his hands to pray: ...\n\n\"Oh, spare their lives for Jesus' sake\nWho did not die in vain!\nFor if I don't keep three hundred head\nMy business is down the drain.\"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If the opening of Ernst Pawel’s biographical study of the 19th-century German poet Heinrich Heine doesn’t grab you, don’t bother to read on. But it if does, treat yourself to a great reading experience by getting hold of the book. ‘The Poet Dying’ includes a selection of Heine’s poems that runs to 80 or so pages, with the originals and the translations facing each other. Read an excerpt from one of the poems, ‘The Slave Ship,’ a depiction of the Dutch slave trade that gives you a solid dose of Heine’s sarcasm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":57266,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[26,18,4,23,17],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-57267","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"category-literature","9":"category-main","10":"category-news","11":"category-political-culture","12":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/the-poet-dying-bdr.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-eTF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57267"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57320,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57267\/revisions\/57320"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}