... in any language, who would try to 'imitate' the lyrics of Heinrich Heine. Translation of poetry has to be a form of imitation, as the American poet Robert Lowell demonstrated in his book "Imitations." So it's a brave as well as rash translator who would attempt to translate Heine's lapidary lyrics not only in meaning of the words but also in the verse forms of the original. But that's what Walter Arndt has done, and though he hasn't matched the master, he's come closer than anyone might have expected, poem after poem.
A native German speaker will certainly not need or want, or perhaps approve of, this book. A person who has no German language at all will probably not be persuaded by these translations that Heinrich Heine deserves his reputation as the greatest of all German lyricists. The book will be of great value, however, to those people who have a little German - a year or two of college, or a childhood memory of a grandparent speaking it - who will find Arndt's translation just close enough to make the Deutsch lucidly intelligible.
Here's a sample in the original and in Arndt's imitation:
Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
Im Norden auf kahler Höh.
Ihn schläfert; mit weissen Decke
Umhüllen ihn Eis und Schnee.
Er träumt von einer Palme,
Die fern im Morgenland
Einsam und schweigend trauert
Auf brennenden Felsenwand.
A single fir stands lonesome
On barren northerly height.
He drowses; frost and snowstorm
Shroud him in swathes of white.
He dreams about a palm. She,
In the orient, far, alone,
Sorrowing stands and silent
At a blazing scarp of stone.
Well, okay... The German is so much plainer and more natural, made of commoner words, effortless in its irony and bittersweetness. Of course the 'gender' of the two trees is implicit in the syntax of German, so it doesn't need to be forced. It's a faint little flower of a poem, and yet it seems as endlessly suggestive as a poem by Emily Dickinson or a single pansy blooming from a crack in the sidewalk.
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