Women’s Private Cosmopolitanism in Literary Translation and Song

Abstract

This chapter considers the ways in which Fanny Hensel’s Drei Lieder nach Heine von Mary Alexander (unpublished, 1830) can be understood as part of cosmopolitan practices among elite women in the nineteenth century. In 1833, Mary Alexander, who wrote letters to Hensel in Berlin using her imperfect German from London, translated poems 1, 4, and 27 from Heinrich Heine’s Die Heimkehr into English. Hensel responded with her own settings of the English-language poems which she composed in Berlin and sent back to Alexander, working in a language she had only recently acquired. Aspects of both Alexander’s engagement with the German language and Hensel’s engagement with English show the ways in which both women intermingled cultures and language in their own textual practices. Hensel’s musical settings of Alexander’s translations show further evidence of an essentially cosmopolitan play between English, Scottish, and German musical and poetic traces.