GERMAN LYRICS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 301, 20 December 1930, Page 16 (Supplement)

GERMAN LYRICS.

"German Lyric Poetry," the latest volume in the excellent "Hogarth Lectures" (Hogarth Press), ' several volumes.of which have been reviewed in our columns, is a.model of its kind. Mr. Norman Macleod deals with his subject in clear and orderly fashion and appends to the German poems quoted good translations of his own, some of them in broad Scots. He is well aware of the impossibility of capturing the qualities of the original; translating Heine, he remarks, is like a second marriage— the triumph of hope tover experience. In no other foreign language, he says, does poetry make such a direct appeal to the English. reader, but the history of German poetry is- strangely unlike that of English. England has had a tradition and continuity of poetry since Chaucer, but in Germany there is a lack of great names and of continuity between' the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. Of the six hundred poems • in the "Oxford Book of German Verse," only .a hundred were written by poets before Goethe, and Goethe died less than a century ago. ' Mr. Macleod is particularly interesting on Heine, whom he .classes with the great lyrists.