L’Arrabbiata · Die Stickerin von Treviso · Die Hochzeit auf Capri · Nerina
Translated from the German by Renata Lenz · Introduction by Idara Crespi
Published 1 October 2026. Join the readers’ list to hear the moment it goes on sale.
The first book in Espresso German Classics. On sale in Kindle and paperback from 1 October 2026.
A fisherwoman rowing between Sorrento and Capri bites the hand of the man who has loved her for a year. In a walled workshop in Treviso, a banner worked in thread decides the fate of a town. On Capri, a single toast at a wedding crosses a line the island was built to keep uncrossed. And 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: one object or gesture so exact that you could cut its outline from black paper and know the whole story. The four stories collected here are studies in exactly that.
He was a Berliner, trained in Classics and Romance philology, who moved to Munich at twenty-two and lived there for the rest of his life. Munich was only where he lived. Italy was where his imagination was, and he went back to it for decades: to Rome, to Naples, to the coast below Vesuvius, to the islands. He wrote about that country the way a person writes about a place that has entered the nervous system and will not leave. His fisherfolk are not scenery. His Capri is not a postcard.
The prose is the reason to read him, and it is not what an English reader expects from a nineteenth-century German. It is warm and physically alert, fast and economical, exact about light and water and faces and hands. He ends on the beat where a lesser writer would add three pages of consolation. His fishermen and grandmothers and island girls talk like people rather than like a costume drama. And he lets his Italians go on speaking Italian inside his German sentences, exclaiming and praying and insulting each other in a language he refused to smooth away.
L’Arrabbiata (1853)
Laurella, called the angry one, rows a priest across to Capri and back with a young boatman who has waited a year for her to speak to him. The story that made Heyse’s name at twenty-two and took him to Munich.
The Embroiderer of Treviso (1868)
A banner worked in a walled workshop, and the town whose fate is decided by what is stitched into it.
The Wedding on Capri (1874)
An island wedding, a toast, and a line that Capri had arranged its whole life around not crossing.
Nerina (1875)
Recanati, the Leopardi house, a silk case, and one underlined line of verse.
Paul Johann Ludwig Heyse (1830–1914) was born in Berlin, the son of a philologist and of a mother whose family counted the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn among its ancestors. He studied Classics and Romance languages in Berlin and Bonn, completed a doctorate, and might have stayed an academic. Then he wrote L’Arrabbiata, and everything changed.
The novella appeared in 1853. King Maximilian II of Bavaria had made it his project to gather the finest writers and intellectuals of Germany at his court in Munich, and L’Arrabbiata caught his attention. Heyse was invited, accepted, and moved to Munich at twenty-two. 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, a celebrated anthology of Italian poetry that he translated himself. 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. The Swedish Academy cited his “art of expression, idealism, and vivacity.” He was eighty when the prize was announced, and he died four years later.
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, whose disappearance from English-language reading lists has been her long-running preoccupation. Heyse won the Nobel Prize in 1910. Within a generation his English readership had collapsed. Her working conviction, and the reason she came to him, is that the books were never the problem.
She drafts fast and revises slowly. The revision takes the greater part of any project: she reads aloud against the German until the two texts agree about what kind of sentence this is. She keeps a running log of the compound nouns she meets, on the theory that the words with no English behind them are the ones that tell you what a writer actually notices. And she will tell you, on the page, which of her own choices she is still not sure about. A translation that hides its decisions is asking to be trusted for the wrong reasons.
She is from Freiburg im Breisgau, the city on the German-French border whose architecture is still arguing about which country it belongs to. She has never entirely trusted writers who cannot tolerate ambiguity. L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas is her first translation for Espresso Publishing House.
Read more about the translators of Espresso Publishing House →
This Espresso Publishing House edition is a new translation made directly from the German source texts, collected in Heyse’s Gesammelte Werke (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1872–1914). It carries an introduction by Idara Crespi on Heyse, the Falcon Theory, and Italy as a German idea; Renata Lenz’s note on the translation; a biographical note on Heyse; notes on the individual stories; and a glossary of the Italian his characters speak inside his German sentences.
Four complete stories in about a hundred and fifty pages. An evening or two, not a season.
Cover art: Anselm Feuerbach, Nanna (1861).
Available in Kindle ebook and paperback from 1 October 2026.
Paul Heyse · Translated by Renata Lenz · 1 October 2026