Poetry

A young lad loves a maiden
she likes another one
that other marries another
whose heart and hand he won

It is an old, old story
yet new with every start,
and every time it happens
it breaks a loving heart.

–Heinrich Heine

Poetry, of course, is notoriously difficult to translate. The Heine translations of which the above is an example (done by Max Knight and Joseph Fabry) are among the fairly rare examples in which the poem as rendered in the target language preserves much of the rhyme and rhythm of the original. This is done, though, at the sacrifice of precision of meaning: even with my mostly-forgotten high school and college German, I can tell that the line

Dem bricht das Herz entzwei

doesn’t say anything about “breaking a loving heart”–rather, if refers to “breaking a heart in two.” Also, the translation uses some rather strange English phrasings (new with every start?) Still, though, I think this kind of translation is a very nice supplement to the more-precise-but-drier translations which seem to be much more common.

A few more Heine poems from the same translators:

Read more