Aiming in his translation for an English haunted and affected by the strangeness of the original, David Constantine offers a wealth of Heinrich von Kleist's key writings in this collection, the most ambitious of its kind.

About the Author

David Constantine is a Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford. His translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Lighter than Air (Bloodaxe) won the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation in 2003.

Reviews

If ever a literary work was a sleep of reason, bruised by menacing shapes, it is Kleist's. He was one of the first of a line of German writers whose inwardness is so intense it seems to dissolve the weak bonds of his society. . . . Even as order and paternalism struggled to assert themselves in the private and public life of the nineteenth century, Kleist was introducing scenes of mob violence, cannibalism, and less than benevolent fathers. . . . David Constantine, a distinguished poet and Germanist, and a translator of Hoelderlin, has taken pains to give us a literary Kleist, 'a writer we cannot do without.' . . . This book, containing all the stories and three key plays, provides a compelling view of a misfit genius who, in one of his last notes, remarked 'the world is a strange set-up.' --Iain Bamforth, The Times Literary Supplement

Book Information
ISBN 9780872207448
Author Heinrich Von Kleist
Format Hardback
Page Count 480
Imprint Hackett Publishing Co, Inc
Publisher Hackett Publishing Co, Inc
Weight(grams) 653g