Un certain retour

Single or Return, Ladies? The Politics of Translating and Publishing Heine on Shakespeare

“…14 Shakspeares Mädchen und Frauen was not only slighter, it was also a work that no more fitted into German Shakespearomanie than Heine, as a Jewish author and Parisian exile, could be described as a paragon of German culture: it remained 'outside [an] institutionalized German Shakespeare reception' with which Heine was yet critically familiar. 15 Before Leland undertook a complete English version of Heine's works, translations of Heine's prose in English had left out his thoughts on Shakespeare altogether: Havelock Ellis's 1887 edition of various Prose Writings by Heine did not include any extract from Shakspeares Mädchen und Frauen. 16 Leland tackled the text fairly early in a project that would take him over a decade and was left incomplete at his death in 1903; even so, there may be something grudging in its inclusion as the last of four items in the multi-text volume that appeared in 1891.…”