Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Betrothal in St Domingo”, Annotated Dual-Language Version with Commentary

What is it about?

Had “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo” been translated into English immediately upon its first publication, it surely would have caused Kleist to be viewed in Britain as a foremost practitioner of the ‘German Gothic’, especially considering the author’s violent suicide only a few months later. Steamy eroticism, unthinkable betrayals, coarse racism, blood and gore – in essence, the story describes a particularly treacherous and deadly honey trap, wherein the victim is first kept at bay through womanly allure and then murdered. After the trap is once again sprung, the bait unexpectedly falls for the victim and the situation rapidly unravels… Heinrich von 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. “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo” can in many ways be read as a deeply cynical swansong, with Kleist’s own method of suicide closely mirrored by that in the story.

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Photo by British Library on Unsplash

Photo by British Library on Unsplash

Why is it important?

“Die Verlobung in St. Domingo” is an important prose work in 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, “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo” a total of six 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.

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