What is it about?
Heinrich von Kleist (1777 – 1811) led a short and frequently troubled life, a displaced aristocrat who at once longed for and resented the more personable trappings of the bourgeoisie. Outside of literature, where he turned to prose after his initial dramatic ambitions met with critical failure, he tried himself at law, science and economics, and later publishing, yet he was too restless and had too little business sense to pursue such ventures to lasting success. Kleist is one of the most widely read German writers of the long 19th century, yet among Anglophone readerships, his work remains largely unknown outside the confines of German studies. This chapter explores how Kleist has been received among Anglophone readers over time, who has translated him previously, what translational approaches seem most suited to a scholarly edition – a close source focus seems apt, also taking into account the prior translations, and what stylistic similarities to Kleist there are in the Anglophone prose of his time, i.e., the Victorian age.
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Why is it important?
In the two volumes of this edition, “The Stories of Heinrich von Kleist”, the stories are presented bilingually with copious amounts of annotation in aid of textual comprehension, drawing attention to lexical shifts in meaning, to intertextual references and parallels, to commonalities between the stories, and to translatological points of interest; individual story commentaries provide further historical context as well as basic interpretational angles. The article at hand is the introductory chapter of the second volume.
Perspectives
Rendering Kleist’s breathless yet detached prose style in English is the kind of challenge that literary translators thrive on, and I am honoured to have had the opportunity of retranslating the entirety of his stories, as well as systematically examining the exact workings of his stylistics. Working in an academic context free of the demands of trade publishing, I have striven to produce a truly foreignised translation, one that rather than hiding Kleist’s perceived flaws and idiosyncrasies reveals them to be unique qualities of his style – and indeed the disruptivity that is so inherent to foreignised translations is an ideal match for Kleist’s own predilection for narrative disruption.
Johannes Contag
Massey University
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This page is a summary of: Introduction: Kleist in English, October 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004742376_002.
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