Heine's love-hate affair with his native Germany is and was notorious, and this long satiric poem shows rather more irritation than love. It was written after a return visit to Germany - Heine spent most of his life in Paris - to see his mother, and the cosmopolitan Jew and leftist saw little to admire. Germany struck him for the most part as fusty, provincial, and clinging to a romanticised past, though he was kinder to his native Hamburg. However, this is the lighter side of Heine as a satirist, not his embittered and scurrilous one, and though his verbal wit and tunefulness are hard to convey, the translation does move along tempo vivace.
B.F.