Travel Pictures

Praise

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

Heine’s short account of his journey through the Harz Mountains remains today, with Sterne’s memories of France and Goethe’s record of Italy, the greatest travel writing in literary history. Funny, biting, but always tender, his digressive rendering is inimitably pleasurable. Now Peter Wortsman’s new translation brings to the English reader Heine’s sumptuous syntax, verbal wit, and stylistic virtuosity. —Eric Banks

Peter Wortsman’s new translation of Travel Pictures, Heine’s major early work, reveals a mercurial writer with a vitriolic streak, one whose comic voice is equal match to his lyricism. —Joao Ribas, Review of Contemporary Fiction

This poet was Heinrich Heine, who dominated me longer than any one author that I have known. —William Dean Howells