What is it about?
“Die Heilige Cäcilie, oder, die Gewalt der Musik. Eine Legende” is a curious tale wherein four young would-be iconoclasts are miraculously transformed into devout workshippers – transformed by the “power”, or the implied “violence”, of a musical performance. The author, Heinrich von Kleist, led a short and frequently troubled life; he was a displaced aristocrat who at once longed for and resented the more personable trappings of the bourgeoisie. Outside of literature, where Kleist 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 Heilige Cäcilie” seems to explore, playfully and parodically, this protestant’s temporary infatuation with Catholicism.
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Why is it important?
“Die heilige Cäcilie” 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 heilige Cäcilie” 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.
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
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: St Cecilia or the Power of Music (II/HC): Text and Translation, October 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004742376_009.
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