BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
For the text I used Die Marquise von O… in Heinrich von Kleist, Werke und Briefe, edited by Peter Goldammer, vol. 3 (Aufbau Verlag, Berlin and Weimar, 1978), and for the Introduction and Chronology I consulted Peter Staengle’s concise Heinrich von Kleist (Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich, 1998), the full biographies by Günter Blamberger (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2011) and Peter Michalzik (List Taschenbuch, Berlin, 2012), and Richard Samuel’s Heinrich von Kleists Teilnahme an den politischen Bewegungen der Jahre 1805–1809 (Kleist-Gedenk- und Forschungstätte, Frankfurt an der Oder, 1995, a translation of a Cambridge thesis completed in 1938 and never published in English). The only biography of Kleist in English is by Joachim Maas of 1977, translated by Ralph Manheim (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1983).
FURTHER READING IN ENGLISH
The most readily available collections of all Kleist stories are The Marquise von O— and Other Stories (Penguin Classics, London, 1978), translated with an Introduction by David Luke and Nigel Reeves, reprinted with Chronology and Further Reading in 2006, and Selected Writings (J. M. Dent, London, 1997), with Introduction, Chronology and Select Bibliography, edited and translated by David Constantine. This contains all the stories, three plays, selections of Kleist’s short, mainly black-humorous anecdotes, three of his philosophical essays and some letters. A larger selection of Kleist’s anecdotes was published in Poetry Nation Review (Manchester, no. 222, 2015), translated by the present translator. An outstanding English-language essay on Kleist is Stephen Vizinczey “The Genius Whose Time Has Come”, in Truth and Lies in Literature (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1986; first published on the bicentenary of Kleist’s birth in The Times, November 1977). See also The Marquise von O— and Other Stories, translated and with an Introduction by Martin Greenberg and Preface by Thomas Mann (New American Library, New York, 1960).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My theory and practice of translation seems to be safety in numbers. Peter Ford and Ellen Farquharson read through my version and made invaluable suggestions, Fred Bridgham (translator of the gravestone epigraph, on p. 19 above) and Antony Wood gave encouragement and John Hibberd advice, but my close collaborator has been Gardis Cramer von Laue. She read the text against the original and made numerous invaluable amendments and corrections. My profound thanks go to her for sharing not only her knowledge of her native German, but also her intricate sense of English. When occasionally at a loss, I turned to the late David Luke’s beautiful, accurate but comparatively free version, whereas in general I found myself trying to stay as close as possible to the original.
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English translation © 2019 Nicholas Jacobs
The Marquise of O— was first published as Die Marquise von O in Dresden, 1808
First published by Pushkin Press in 2019
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ISBN 13: 978–1–78227–530–5
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