Single or Return, Ladies? The Politics of Translating and Publishing Heine on Shakespeare

This article contrasts two English translations of Heinrich Heine's Shakspeares Mädchen und Frauen (1838), produced by Charles Godfrey Leland (1891) and Ida Benecke (1895), which are now regularly (though randomly) quoted in Shakespeare scholarship. The comparison sheds light on different strategies involved in translating a text as an independent document or as part of a ‘Collected Works’ series. The discrepancies between publication contexts are correlated with differences between domesticating and foreignizing approaches, and with the diverging appreciations of Heine's place within Shakespeare criticism that such choices entail. The translators' gender politics are also shown to affect their renderings of Heine's text on female characters in Shakespeare, which was itself indebted to a book by Anna Jameson (1832). Finally, cultural transfer theory and histoire croisée are used to explore a ‘re-transfer’ that involved British Shakespeare critics, an atypical Jewish-German writer who drew on their work, and Heine's ‘English’ translators. The article highlights the necessary imbrication of translation studies and book history in the analysis of complex transcultural forms of textual production, of which Shakespeare criticism is paradigmatic.