Espresso German Classics

Paul
Heyse

Paul Johann Ludwig Heyse, 1830–1914

Novelist, poet and dramatist  ·  L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas in the Espresso German Classics

The book The translator

A life in Munich

Paul Johann Ludwig Heyse (1830–1914) was born in Berlin, the son of the philologist Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Heyse and of Julie Saaling. His father had spent eight years as private tutor in the Mendelssohn Bartholdy household, with Felix among his pupils; his mother was a cousin of Felix’s mother. He studied Classics and Romance languages in Berlin and Bonn, completed a doctorate, and might have stayed an academic. Then he went to Italy.

He met the story at Sorrento in 1853, and L’Arrabbiata appeared the following year in the yearbook Argo. By then the rest of his life had been arranged for him elsewhere. King Maximilian II of Bavaria had set out to gather the finest writers and intellectuals of Germany at his court in Munich, and the king’s literary adviser, the poet Emanuel Geibel, put forward the name of a gifted and almost entirely unknown twenty-four-year-old. The invitation came in March 1854. Heyse accepted, and arrived in Munich that May. He would spend the rest of his life there, until his death in 1914, travelling to Italy again and again in the decades between.

His output was enormous: novels, plays, poetry, and the Italienisches Liederbuch of 1860, several hundred Italian folk poems he had put into German himself, which Hugo Wolf would later set to music. But the Novellen, in the precise German sense of the word, were where he excelled. He was the most articulate theorist of the form as well as its most practised exponent, and his Falkentheorie is drawn from Boccaccio’s story of Federigo, who sacrifices his prized falcon to honour the woman he loves.

In 1910 Heyse received the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded, in the Academy’s words, “as a tribute to the consummate artistry, permeated with idealism, which he has demonstrated during his long productive career as a lyric poet, dramatist, novelist and writer of world-renowned short stories.” It is a citation that reads like a summing-up, which is what it was. He was eighty when the prize was announced. He died three and a half years later.

Heyse in the Espresso German Classics

L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas

L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas

L’Arrabbiata, Die Stickerin von Treviso, Die Hochzeit auf Capri, Nerina  ·  Paul Heyse, 1854 to the mid-1890s

Translated from the German by Renata Lenz

Kindle & Paperback Publication date 1 October 2026

A silk-spinner crossing between Sorrento and Capri bites the hand of the boatman who has loved her for a year. In a walled workshop in Treviso, a banner worked in thread puts a woman in the sight of the man the whole city has turned out to see. On Capri, the man the bride did not marry toasts her at her wedding, drains his glass and lets it smash on the floor, and the word for a smashed glass becomes the word for what has happened to him. In the house at Recanati, a silk case holds one underlined line of poetry that a young Giacomo Leopardi cannot say aloud.

Paul Heyse called the hinge of every true novella its falcon: the one thing specific enough to set a story apart from a thousand others, with an outline you could cut from black paper and recognize whole. These four are studies in exactly that. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1910. This volume brings all four stories into English in a new translation made directly from the German.

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The translator

Renata Lenz is a literary translator working from German into English. Her subject is the German Poetic Realists, Storm and Fontane and Keller, and above all Paul Heyse.

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