The Marquise of O and Other Stories

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Authors: Heinrich von Kleist
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factors intrude and in which sanity is poised on the brink of destruction. They are the work of a rationalist tormented by his loss of faith in Reason and desperately searching for certainty, for an order which is not
‘gebrechlich’
. In Kleisf’s life this search could only fail; the only imposable order was that of his art, an order of words, the strange patterns of his three or four dramatic masterpieces, the electrifying articulated structures of his narrative prose. The qualities of the latter which have made it the subject of much intensive stylistic scrutiny are of course the very qualities to which a translator cannot hope to do justice. He must merely seek to achieve a compromise that will suggest something of the simultaneous complexity and elegance of the original, while respecting the limits to which Englishsyntax can reasonably be pushed. We have felt that a new attempt was justified: Martin Greenberg’s version (New York, 1960; Faber and Faber 1963; now out of print) was marred by too many errors of comprehension and taste, which we have tried to avoid, while remaining in good measure indebted to its frequent felicities.
    Nigel Reeves and David Luke collaborated on the Introduction and on the translation of
Michael Kohlhaas
; the other seven stories were translated by David Luke.

The Earthquake in Chile
    I N Santiago, the capital of the kingdom of Chile, at the moment of the great earthquake of 1647 in which many thousands lost their lives, a young Spaniard called Jerónimo Rugera was standing beside one of the pillars in the prison to which he had been committed on a criminal charge, and was about to hang himself. A year or so previously Don Enrico Asterón, one of the richest noblemen of the city, had turned him out of his house where he had been employed as a tutor, for being on too intimate a footing with Asteró’s only daughter, Doña Josefa. She herself was sternly warned, but owing to the malicious vigilance of her proud brother she was discovered nevertheless in a secret rendezvous with Jerónimo, and this so aroused her old father’s indignation that he forced her to enter the Carmelite convent of Our Lady of the Mountain.
    A happy chance had enabled her lover to resume the liaison in this very place, and one quiet night the convent garden became the scene of his joy’s consummation. On the day of Corpus Christi, the solemn procession of the nuns, with the novices following them, was just beginning when, as the bells pealed out, the unhappy Josefa collapsed on the cathedral steps in the pangs of childbirth.
    This incident caused an extraordinary public stir; without any regard for her condition the young sinner was at once imprisoned, and her confinement was scarcely over when by the Archbishop’s command she was put on trial with the utmost rigour. The scandal was talked of in the city with so much anger and the whole convent in which it had taken place was criticized on all sides with such harshness that neither the intercession of the Asterón family, nor even thewishes of the Abbess herself, who had conceived an affection for the young girl on account of her otherwise irreproachable conduct, could mitigate the strict penalty to which she was subject by conventual law. All that could be done was that the Viceroy commuted her sentence from death at the stake to death by beheading, a decision which greatly outraged the matrons and virgins of Santiago.
    In the streets through which the culprit was to be led to her execution the windows were rented, the roofs of the houses were partly dismantled, and the pious daughters of the city invited their female friends to witness with them, in sisterly companionship, this spectacle about to be offered to divine vengeance.
    Jerónimo, who in the meantime had also been imprisoned, went almost out of his mind when he was informed of this appalling turn of events. In vain he pondered plans of rescue: wherever the wings

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