- Person
- Emma Lazarus
- Lived
- 1849–1887
- Field
- Poetry
- From
- American
The story
Emma Lazarus grew up in a wealthy New York family and was educated by private tutors, studying mythology, music, American poetry and European literature as well as German, French and Italian. Her languages shaped her work from the start. Her first book, Poems and Translations, published when she was a teenager, already included translations from Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich Heine, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo.
Heine, the great German poet of the early nineteenth century, became one of her lasting companions. By 1877 she had translated his poem "Donna Clara", about the crypto-Jewish lover of a Spanish noblewoman, and written two monologues based on it. In 1881 she published a full volume, Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heine, in New York, prefaced by a biographical sketch of the poet.
The book was well received. The Jewish Women's Archive says it won high praise, and Wikipedia records that her renderings of some of Heine's verse are considered among the best in English. Translating Heine is notoriously hard: his short lyrics depend on simple words, musical rhythm and sudden turns of irony, all of which can vanish in another language.
Lazarus was drawn to Heine for personal as well as literary reasons. He had been born a Jew and later baptised, and his divided identity fascinated her. In 1884 she explored it in "The Poet Heine", an essay for the Century that the Jewish Women's Archive calls her finest literary essay, describing him as a Jew with the mind and eyes of a Greek. The theme of being both inside and outside a culture echoed her own experience as an American Jewish writer.
Her work as a translator also included adaptations of German poems by Goethe, about whom she wrote her novel Alide in 1874. Later she turned the same skill toward the medieval Hebrew poets of Spain, using the German versions of the scholars Michael Sachs and Abraham Geiger to bring their verse into English. Through her translations, American readers could meet some of Europe's finest poets in their own language, and her Heine versions are still cited among the best.
Why it matters
Her translations carried one of Europe's great poets to American readers and remain a standard by which English versions of Heine are judged.
About Emma Lazarus
New York poet of old Sephardic stock who championed Jewish refugees and wrote ‘The New Colossus’, the sonnet that made the Statue of Liberty a ‘Mother of Exiles’.
More about Emma Lazarus
- Emma Lazarus wrote the first prose poem in EnglishEmma Lazarus's "By the Waters of Babylon", about the exile of the Jews from Spain, is credited by the Jewish Women's Archive as the first prose poem in English.
- Emma Lazarus gave the Statue of Liberty its welcomeIn 1883 Emma Lazarus wrote 'The New Colossus', the sonnet that turned the Statue of Liberty into a symbol of welcome for the world's refugees and immigrants.
Sources
- Emma Lazarus Wikipedia
- Emma Lazarus Jewish Women's Archive
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