Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), one of Germany’s most revered poets, is equally well-known for his idiosyncratic prose, the vibrant voice of which feels astonishingly modern in its familiar tone and thematic acrobatics. Travel Pictures comprises the accounts of four journeys taken at different times in his life. The opening "Harz Journey," a quirky chronicle of his walking tour in the Harz Mountains, is the text that first made him famous. But in all four accounts, Heine, seasoned by the skepticism of a born outsider, does more than climb mountains, ford streams and cross borders. In this remarkable book, Heine propels German letters into the Modern mindset. Freud cites a few of Travel Pictures’ most humorous passages in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Heine’s incomparable lyric vision lifts the book into the transcendent realm of great journey literature. Heine possesses that divine malice without which I cannot imagine perfection . . . And how he employs German! It will one day be said that Heine and I have been by far the first artists of the German language. —Friedrich Nietzsche

Heine’s short account of his journey through the Harz Mountains remains today, with Sterne’s memories of France and Goethe’s record of Italy, the greatest travel writing in literary history. Funny, biting, but always tender, his digressive rendering is inimitably pleasurable. Now Peter Wortsman’s new translation brings to the English reader Heine’s sumptuous syntax, verbal wit, and stylistic virtuosity. —Eric Banks

Peter Wortsman's new translation of Travel Pictures, Heine's major early work, reveals a mercurial writer with a vitriolic streak, one whose comic voice is equal match to his lyricism. —Joao Ribas, Review of Contemporary Fiction

This poet was Heinrich Heine, who dominated me longer than any one author that I have known. —William Dean Howells