Heinrich von Kleist's “Marquise von O….” - Annotated Dual-Language Version with Commentary

What is it about?

Heinrich von Kleist’s “Marquise von O….”, first published in 1808, opens thus: “In M..., an important town in northern Italy, the widowed Marquise von O...., a lady of exemplary reputation and mother to several well-reared children, had the following announced in the newspapers: that she, without her knowledge, had come to be in a delicate condition, that the father, of the child which she would bear, was to declare himself; and that she, out of regard for her family, was resolved to marry him.” As might be expected, much upheaval ensues, and although the story resolves in a seemingly happy end, the conclusions to be drawn from it are rather sober. From a current perspective, “Marquise von O….” can be read as a provocative depiction of systemic bias against victims of sexual transgression, with the echelons of aristocracy in the story mirroring those of today’s power structures. Heinrich von Kleist 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 and later also at publishing, yet he was too restless and had too little business sense to pursue such ventures to lasting success. Kleist’s narrative style in “Marquise von O….” is informed by the tensions of his changing life directions – the poetic eloquence carried over from his dramatic writing is offset by the persuasive, matter-of-fact descriptiveness of the legal style that he learnt during his law studies.

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Photo by Europeana on Unsplash

Photo by Europeana on Unsplash

Why is it important?

“Marquise von O….” is one of the most widely taught prose works within the canon of German literature, and Heinrich von Kleist 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. While the stories have been translated into English comparatively often, “Marquise von O….” a total of eight times, Kleist’s idiosyncratically nested syntax is usually made at least slightly more palatable to Anglophone tastes, and no critical translation edition for scholarly use has existed until now. In the two volumes of “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, and detailed introductory chapters examine both the specifics of Kleist’s prose style as well as his Anglophone framing.

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