Beschreibung
This is the first English translation of Kleist‘s extraordinary 1808 drama about Herrmann (Arminius), whose defeat of Varus‘ Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest (AD 9) elevated him in the German imagination to the status of “founding father.” The volume includes an extensive critical apparatus providing the information necessary to grasp Kleist‘s masterpiece in terms of both its historical setting in Roman Germania and the period in which it was written, Napoleonic Europe. It also allows the play to come alive in our own contemporary literary and cultural context, offering timely critical insights into the rhetoric of nationalism and the ideology of partisan warfare. The play‘s jagged free verse and deliberately contorted syntax is rendered into an English version that follows the original as closely as possible while attending to the needs of the modern reader. The English text thus does justice to the exceptional power and irreverence of Kleist‘s language and ideas, which had a profound influence on German Expressionism, and on writers as diverse as Carl Schmitt, Ionesco, E.L. Doctorow, and Deleuze and Guattari. This critical translation makes Kleist‘s subtle and revealing anatomy of nationhood, power and political strategy fully accessible, for the first time, to international students and scholars of cultural studies, politics and literature Die Übersetzerin Rachel MagShamhráin lehrt an der Universität Cork.