What is it about?
Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Earthquake in Chili”, first published in 1807, is a tale of the catastrophic outcomes that may spring from transgressive young love, with a tantalising promise of reprieve cruelly undone by a burst of religious fanaticism – plot elements which in the light of today’s increasing societal polarisation resonate as strongly as they ever have. Kleist led a short and frequently troubled life, a displaced aristocrat who at once longed for and resented the more personable trappings of the bourgeoisie. Outside of literature, where he turned to prose after his initial dramatic ambitions met with critical failure, he tried himself at law and later also at publishing, yet he was too restless and had too little business sense to pursue such ventures to lasting success. Kleist’s narrative style in “The Earthquake in Chili” is informed by the tensions of his changing life directions – the poetic eloquence carried over from his dramatic writing is offset by the persuasive, matter-of-fact descriptiveness of the legal style that he learnt during his law studies. While the latter influence becomes more pronounced in later works, the “Earthquake in Chili” bears the most traces of Kleist’s lingering dramatic expressivity, which makes it all the more engaging and intensely tragic.
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Why is it important?
“The Earthquake in Chili” is one of the most widely interpreted prose works within the canon of German literature, and Heinrich von Kleist one of the most widely read German writers of the long 19th century – yet among Anglophone readerships, his work remains largely unknown outside the confines of German studies. While the stories have been translated into English comparatively often, “The Earthquake in Chili” a total of eleven times, Kleist’s idiosyncratically nested syntax is usually made at least slightly more palatable to Anglophone tastes, and no critical translation edition for scholarly use has existed until now. In the two volumes of “The Stories of Heinrich von Kleist”, the stories are presented bilingually with copious amounts of annotation in aid of textual comprehension, drawing attention to lexical shifts in meaning, to intertextual references and parallels, to commonalities between the stories, and to translatological points of interest; individual story commentaries provide further historical context as well as basic interpretational angles, and detailed introductory chapters examine both the specifics of Kleist’s prose style as well as his Anglophone framing. A foreword by Tim Mehigan discusses the intellectual framework in which Kleist was operating as an author.
Perspectives
Rendering Kleist’s breathless yet detached prose style in English is the kind of challenge that literary translators thrive on, and I am honoured to have had the opportunity of retranslating the entirety of his stories. Working in an academic context free of the demands of trade publishing, I have striven to produce a truly foreignised translation, one that rather than hiding Kleist’s perceived flaws and idiosyncrasies reveals them to be unique qualities of his style – and indeed the disruptivity that is so inherent to foreignised translations is an ideal match for Kleist’s own predilection for narrative disruption.
Johannes Contag
Massey University
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This page is a summary of: The Earthquake in Chili (I/EiC): Text and Translation, October 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004742352_007.
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