HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heinrich Heine
while doing justice to the verbal dress in which this
spirit \v2is garbed. Martin's rendering was faithful
and conscientious but this respectable Victorian
was, according to Buchanan, more fitted by temperament
to become the biographer of the blameless
Prince Consort of England than to become the
interpreter of the inspired Gnome of German
poetry. A refined and cultivated gentleman like
Theodore Martin, who was called upon to edit and
to prepare dainty documents of the Court, could
not be equally successful with the hterary products
of a revolutionary poet. As a result, his English
adaptations were no more like the original than
the postures of a dancing master were like the
leaps of Oberon on the starlit sward: "As wild as
Goethe's Flea, as tricksome as an Elf, as uncertain
and misleading as a Will-o'-the-Wisp, gamesome
and lachrymose by turns, by turns outraging all the
proprieties, now the most doleful German that
ever spun ditties to his mistress's eyebrow, and
again (what Thiers called him) the wittiest Frenchman
that ever lived, Heine is the last spirit in the
world to rise to the conjuration of a respectable
elderly English gentleman, armed with a German
dictionary, a quill pen, and an 'expurgating' apparatus."
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