Travel Pictures
Travel Pictures
By Heinrich Heine
Translated by Peter Wortsman
"Heine possesses that divine malice without which I cannot imagine perfection . . . And how he employs German! It will one day be said that Heine and I have been by far the first artists of the German language."—Friedrich Nietzsche
Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), one of Germany’s most revered poets, is equally well-known for his idiosyncratic prose, the vibrant voice of which feels astonishingly modern in its familiar tone and thematic acrobatics. Travel Pictures comprises the accounts of four journeys taken at different times in his life. The opening “Harz Journey,” a quirky chronicle of his walking tour in the Harz Mountains, is the text that first made him famous. But in all four accounts, Heine, seasoned by the skepticism of a born outsider, does more than climb mountains, ford streams and cross borders. In this remarkable book, Heine propels German letters into the Modern mindset. Freud cites a few of Travel Pictures’ most humorous passages in "Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious." Heine’s incomparable lyric vision lifts the book into the transcendent realm of great journey literature.
Paperback
233 pages
Archipelago, 2008
Originally published in 1826
6.5 x 0.63 x 7.91 inches
ISBN 9780979333033
Travel Writing, German Romanticism