BOOKS
THE BROWN BOOK OF HEINRICH HEINE
HEINRICH,HEINE:
PARADOX AND POET.
By Louis Untermeyer.
Two volumes. Harcourt, Brace. $6.00.
Strictly speaking, there are two books and they are blue. Neatly
packaged, gaudily displayed, highly seasoned, expensively put up, ready to
be hastily purchased and casually consumed, they constitute a choice
item for the delicatessen trade. One volume, a revision and enlargement
of the translation published twenty years ago, contains almost half of
Heine's verse. The other is a life, the product-according to the jacket-
of a lifetime of study. The biographer and translator is described as "the
American Heine." In a preface Louis Untermeyer demurely meets this
description half-way. In an appendix he intrepidly includes an original
poem, an imitation of Browning which presents the prostrate Unter-
meyer-Heine dying in the bosom of the synagogue.
Pareto called Reinach's
Orpheus
a history of religions in the light
of the Dreyfus case. Here, then, is a biography of Heine in the light of
the Hitler terror. The timeliness of this theme, the motives of the author,
the implications of his Pan-Hebraism-these red herrings are easily reo
sisted. But since Untermeyer is inclined to make Heine the vehicle for
his own particular
]udenschmerz,
and since his interpretation is likely to
be much publicized, there is some excuse for calling attention to the
limitations of his equipment and the distortions of his point of view.
A critic who can detect "spiritual nostalgia" in Heine's picture of Moses
Lump eating
gefiillte
fish (page 177) is bound to be led astray by so
elusive and embattled a writer. And it is characteristic of Untermeyer,
even in this instance, that he should tamper with the bill of fare.
A further glance at his documentation will not inspire confidence.
He cites, on page 157, Heine's celebrated remarks about Liberty: the
Englishman loves her as his lawful wife, the Frenchman as his chosen
bride (Untermeyer has "mistress"), and the German as his old grand-
mother. Yet the irritable Englishman, translates Untermeyer, "in a fit
of temper
(seines Weibes iiberdriissig?) ,
may put a rope around his wife's
neck."-Und bringt sie zum Verhauf nach Smithfield,
adds Heine. She
is not to be hanged, she is only to be auctioned off. In the course of a
lifetime of study one may forget that Smithfield is a cattle market, but
one ought to pick up a reading knowledge of German. One ought to
pick up, indeed, a certain familiarity with Heine's writings. It would be
impossible to assert that Heine never set down his impressions of Paganini
(192) if one were familiar with the
Florentinische Niichte.
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