Kleist: Selected Writings

“If ever a literary work was a sleep of reason, bruised by menacing shapes, it is Kleist’s. He was one of the first of a line of German writers whose inwardness is so intense it seems to dissolve the weak bonds of his society. . . . Even as order and paternalism struggled to assert themselves in the private and public life of the nineteenth century, Kleist was introducing scenes of mob violence, cannibalism, and less than benevolent fathers. . . . David Constantine, a distinguished poet and Germanist, and a translator of Hölderlin, has taken pains to give us a literary Kleist, ‘a writer we cannot do without.’ . . . This book, containing all the stories and three key plays, provides a compelling view of a misfit genius who, in one of his last notes, remarked ‘the world is a strange set-up.’”
     —Iain Bamforth, The Times Literary Supplement

SKU
26386g

Heinrich Von Kleist
Edited and Translated by David Constantine

2004 - 480 pp.

Grouped product items
Format ISBN Price Qty
Cloth 978-0-87220-744-8
$47.00
Paper 978-0-87220-743-1
$18.00

A reprint of the J. M. Dent edition of 1997.

Aiming in his translation for “an English haunted and affected by the strangeness of the original,” David Constantine offers a wealth of Heinrich von Kleist’s key writings in this collection, the most ambitious of its kind.

Reviews:

“If ever a literary work was a sleep of reason, bruised by menacing shapes, it is Kleist’s. He was one of the first of a line of German writers whose inwardness is so intense it seems to dissolve the weak bonds of his society. . . . Even as order and paternalism struggled to assert themselves in the private and public life of the nineteenth century, Kleist was introducing scenes of mob violence, cannibalism, and less than benevolent fathers. . . . David Constantine, a distinguished poet and Germanist, and a translator of Hölderlin, has taken pains to give us a literary Kleist, ‘a writer we cannot do without.’ . . . This book, containing all the stories and three key plays, provides a compelling view of a misfit genius who, in one of his last notes, remarked ‘the world is a strange set-up.’”
     —Iain Bamforth, The Times Literary Supplement

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Chronology of Kleist’s Life and Times.
Introduction.
Note on the Translation.
Select Bibliography.

PLAYS:
The Broken Jug.
Amphitryon.
The Prince of Homburg.

STORIES:
Michael Kohlhaas.
The Marquise of O.
The Chilean Earthquake.
Betrothal in San Domingo.
The Beggarwoman of Locarno.
The Foundling.
Saint Cecilia.
The Duel.

ANECDOTES:
Hospital Incident.
Anecdote (Capuchin and Swabian).
Anecdote (Two English Boxers).
A Latter-Day (and More Fortunate) Werther.
Strange Court Case in England.

ESSAYS:
On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking.
Reflection. A Paradox.
The Puppet Theater.

Letters.
Notes

 

About the Author:

David Constantine is a Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford. His translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Lighter than Air (Bloodaxe) won the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation in 2003.