GSA 2023 Heinrich Heine and Translation (01.03.2023)
CFP: Heinrich Heine and Translation
North American Heine Society
German Studies Association Conference
October 5-8, 2023
Montreal, Canada
Heinrich Heine’s oeuvre and reception raise important questions about the poetics and ethics of translation. Notable US poets, for example, have translated his well-known early poetry with very different motivations, including situating it in his biography as a German Jew (Emma Lazarus), reflecting his lyrical refinement (Ezra Pound), and radically communicating the ambiguities of his poems through homophonic translation (Charles Bernstein). Additionally, modern Hebrew poets and Jewish translators balanced their love of Heine with his apostasy and Germanness after the Shoah. Heine’s sprawling oeuvre, comprising of poetry, essays, journalism, and voluminous correspondence, also begs the question of how much of a writer’s work must be translated, a question Charles Godfrey Leland repeatedly raises in his twenty-volume nineteenth-century translation of Heine’s works (the most complete English translation to date). Moreover, Heine’s regular use of untranslated words and sentences from other languages (including French, English, Latin, and Hebrew) suggests he imagined his German as polyphonous and energized by the tension of translatability and untranslatability.
Our panel seeks papers on Heine and translation. Paper topics may address, but are not limited to:
- The history of Heine translations
- Translations of Heine by notable authors (Matthew Arnold, Emma Lazarus, Mark Twain, Gérard de Nerval, Mikhail Lermontov, etc.)
- Comparative readings of translations of a single Heine text
- Heine’s translations of Lord Byron
- Multilingualism in Heine’s writing
Please send a 200-250 word abstract and a 100-word bio to Abigail Gillman (agillman@bu.edu) and Michael Swellander (mswellander@skidmore.edu) by March 1, 2023.