Kleist: Selected Writings

Description

A reprint of the J M Dent edition of 1997. Heinrich von Kleist was born and grew up in the Enlightenment and died in a suicide pact in 1811, aged only thirty-four. He left behind him literary works which are among the most disturbing and amusing of any produced in that revolutionary and romantic period. He is a modern writer: in the characters and situations he created we recognise our own aspirations and anxieties. Selected Writings includes a translation, with notes, of Kleist's best known plays, stories, and essays.

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.

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