Enrique Beck

Grave in the Hörnli cemetery

Enrique Beck (actually Heinrich Beck , also Heinrich Enrique Beck , born on February 12, 1904 in Cologne ; died on September 16, 1974 in Riehen ) was a German-Swiss poet and translator. He translated the works of the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca , who was murdered in 1936, into German and made him known to a wider audience. He campaigned for the performance of his plays, which made Lorca popular posthumously in the 1950s. In 1946 Beck had secured the sole translation rights into the German language from Lorca's heirs. The transmissions are judged to be insufficient and falsifying. In 1998, Suhrkamp Verlag took public action against the translation monopoly, which Beck jealously guarded . His lyrical work was not very successful, only one volume of poems was published during his lifetime. During the Nazi era he lived as an emigrant in Spain and Switzerland. He stayed in Switzerland even after the end of the Second World War .

Life

Childhood, training, underground work in Hanover

Beck was the son of Hedwig Beck, nee Meyer, and Carl Beck. The parents were Jews, Heinrich remained their only child. In the year of his birth, the family moved to Hanover . Beck grew up in financially secure circumstances. His father worked as a bank clerk and taught at a commercial college until 1915 . He later became self-employed as an auditor and auditor.

Heinrich Beck attended a reform school , the Bismarck School . He left her with the upper secondary certificate . He had to give up his desire to study veterinary medicine when the family fortunes dwindled due to the inflation during the Weimar Republic . After another school year at a commercial college, he completed a commercial and technical apprenticeship in a printing company. He worked in various printing companies until he went to Cologne in 1927, where he started his own business as a copywriter.

In 1930 he moved to Hanover . There he joined the underground resistance group, Committee for Proletarian Unity , in January 1933 and worked on the publication of its press organ. The group was soon spied on. In August 1933 he fled to Switzerland. He had been warned of the imminent arrest by the father of a school friend.

Exile in Switzerland and Spain

The Swiss authorities only gave Beck a transitasylum, which obliged him to leave the country. He stayed in the cantons of Zurich , Bern and Basel , where he was deported. Through his chance acquaintance with the daughter of a Spanish consul in Bern, he got an entry visa for Spain.

In 1934 he reached the second country of his exile. There he changed his first name to the Spanish form Enrique. When this happened is uncertain. In Barcelona he made his way as a newspaper seller. After a while he had a permanent book and newspaper stand at which he sold anti-fascist publications. Beck organized himself into a socialist group, the Unío Socialista de Catalunya (USC). In the middle of the year he joined the committee against war and fascism , in which he became chairman of the German and Austrian sections. In the early phase of the Spanish Civil War , Beck temporarily took part in street fights, but had to give up for health reasons.

In July 1936, the USC united with other socialist and communist parties to form the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC, United Socialist Party of Catalonia). Within the Unity Party, the USC fell behind. The communists took over the leadership and formed it into the cadre party . Beck protested against this several times. In August 1936 the private police of the PSUC arrested him and delivered him to the occupied Hotel Colón , which served as the party headquarters and command center of the Comintern on the Iberian Peninsula. Beck was accused of espionage and fascist cell formation. Isak Overseer from the International Anti-Fascist Committee of Emigrants came to his aid and freed him with an anarchist patrol.

First encounter with Lorca's work

Federico García Lorca (1898-1936)

Also in August 1936, the month in which Lorca was murdered, Beck came across his work for the first time. There are different representations of the circumstances. It is possible that he discovered an article by the Catalan literary critic Sebastián Gasch about Lorca in the waiting room of the doctor Juan Civit Belfort, whereupon he bought his gypsy romances. According to another account, he read two of Lorca's poems in a dentist's waiting room, which he immediately translated and noted on the margin of the magazine. Beck himself wrote: “The lightning bolt had struck, I was as in love as usual with women […], I translated, the manuscripts were confiscated, I obtained their return, worked, changed. I never thought of Edition, where else? "

Further imprisonment in Spain and departure

Beck was arrested again in September 1936 and was released a week later. The third arrest followed in May 1937. In November he was conditionally released and taken into “honorary custody”, where he remained under guard. He was offered a job on the condition that he would refrain from criticizing the Communist Party in the future. Beck waived and tried to get an exit permit to France, which he received in December 1937.

He was arrested again on the border with France on charges of having fascist documents in his apartment. Beck was charged with treason and espionage. In February 1938 the acquittal was issued without trial. In the same month he drove to Switzerland via France. He arrived there in April 1938. His attempt to get legal residence status in France had failed; A refuge overseas was simply out of the question due to the lack of resources.

In Switzerland, Beck received temporary residence permits that were linked to a strict ban on gainful employment. As an agnostic , he could not expect any support from the Jewish community in Basel despite his Jewish origins; they referred him to the non-denominational aid center for refugees. He translated five romances of the Romancero gitano that appeared in the July / August 1938 issue of the magazine Heute und Morgen published by Stauffacher. Before Beck, Jean Gebser , a friend of Lorca's, had translated his works into German. Gebser published the poems in 1936 in the anthology New Spanish Poetry .

In the summer of 1938 Beck met the contralto Ines Leuwen, actually Agnes Löwenstein (1902–1976). Thea Sternheim's eldest daughter fled to Switzerland in March 1938 after the annexation of Austria . They married in 1960.

Translation of the Romancero gitano , acceptance of sole translation rights

In September 1938, Stauffacher Beck's transmission of the Romancero gitano was published by the Swiss publishing house . Although the paragraph remained low, the translation of the work sparked approval from Thomas Mann , who had the manuscript. In the spring of 1939, Heinz Politzer discussed the original and the translation in Mann's exile magazine Maß und Wert .

Beck's residency and financial situation remained precarious, and he was dependent on support from aid organizations and friends. Again and again he was threatened with deportation, for him, among others, Hermann Hesse , André Gide and Hans Oprecht were related . The American Guild for German Cultural Freedom finally granted him a temporary grant for Lorca translations. In April 1944, Lorca's Blood Wedding was performed as the first stage play in German in Beck's translation at the Schauspielhaus Zurich (directed by Leonard Steckel ). Because Beck was not allowed to work, it had to be approved by the Aliens Police .

For a long time, the legal status of translations, whose rights usually lie with publishers and not with individuals, remained unclear. Beck tried again and again to influence Lorca's heirs in order to be able to publish his transmissions. It was not until February 15, 1946, that Lorca's brother Francisco García Lorca (1902–1974), professor of literature in the United States and writer, assured Beck in a telegram the sole right to translate into German. Francisco García Lorca had as little as the other heirs grasped the scope of the legal epithet " authorized ", as the nephew of the poet and later administrator Manuel Fernández Montesinos later admitted . The family replaced this legally valid agreement by telegram with a new contract in 1956. After Beck's death in 1974, Ines Leuwen initially took over the representation of Beck's rights and, from 1976, the Heinrich Enrique Beck Foundation.

After the Second World War

After the end of World War II , the Swiss authorities asked Beck to return to Germany. He refused, his goal was Spain, but not during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco . In 1950 he received a work permit in Switzerland. He devoted his life to broadcasting Lorca’s work and committed to the performance of his plays.

In 1947 Beck had signed a contract for Lorca's dramas with Kurt Reiss' Basler Theaterverlag , and in 1952 he began working with Insel Verlag . The exclusive rights made it possible for him and his wife to have an adequate life with lots of travel. However, the sole right was challenged, for example in 1955 by the Stockholm theater agent Karin Alin. She alleged that Lorca's mother and sister, who had returned to Spain from the United States, had given her the rights. Beck intervened with Francisco García Lorca, who resolved the conflict by explaining it with the distance between family members.

At the University of Basel in 1948 Beck gave a lecture on poetry as order and adventure . He talked about this at the autumn meeting of Group 47 in October 1949, to which Hans Werner Richter had invited to Utting am Ammersee .

Financially advantageous for Beck was that the Germans discovered Lorca for themselves in the 1950s. In 1950, Der Spiegel stated that the Lorca boom had reached Germany: "Enrique Beck can now be stingy with his rights, which he previously tried so long and so in vain to sell." While doing so, he happily watched over the productions of Lorca's plays and went so far as to intervene in the direction.

In 1955, the Spanish Republic in exile , based in Paris , awarded him the Knight's Cross of the Order of Liberation. In the laudatory speech it was said that Beck had developed “through his loyalty to the republic, through his love for Spain, which offered him asylum and freedom from 1933 to 1938, through his admiration for Spanish literature and his devotion to one of the greatest poets […] Worthy of the trust and gratitude of the free Spaniards ”.

From 1954 onwards, Beck sued the Federal Republic for financial compensation for the injustice suffered by National Socialism. At the second instance, in February 1958, he was awarded redress .

Beck received Swiss citizenship in 1959. Two years earlier, the application had been rejected. The Swiss Federal Prosecutor's Office suspected him of communist sentiments, that a “proper adjustment to Swiss conditions” had not taken place since he sought refuge in 1938 with “a well-known communist” in Switzerland. She had been his landlady then. The politician Hans-Peter Tschudi then campaigned for his naturalization .

At the end of the 1960s, Enrique Beck and his wife moved to Riehen. In 1971 he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Although the operation was successful, he did not fully recover. Ines Leuwen tried to have his poems published during this time, but failed. He spent the last months after his 70th birthday, cared for by his wife, at home in a sick bed. He died on September 16, 1974. Ines Leuwen expressed her expectation that his lyrical work would gain fame in the future: “The future will honor the great poet.” Beck was cremated and buried in the Hörnli cemetery. His grave is in District 9, Department 5, Grave No. 509.

Beck's lyric

Beck has been writing his own poems since the 1940s. Some were published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Frankfurter Rundschau , among others . The volume Gedichte was published by Insel Verlag in 1963 , and two more were to follow as contractually guaranteed. Siegfried Unseld, the publisher of Suhrkamp Verlag , which had taken over Insel Verlag that same year, prevented the publication of further works. Ines Leuwen complained in a letter to Arnold Hauser in 1973 : “Dr. Unseld has no access to Beck's verses - he refused to fulfill the existing contracts, preferred to pay for the unprinted edition and refused to redistribute the copies of the first published volume. "

Beck's ancient language met with resistance. In 1972, Rudolf Hartung rejected Beck's poetry from being printed in the Neue Rundschau and justified his decision with an "often noticeable gap between the - often so beautiful - language of many of your works and the language of the 'modern' poem". After the Germanist and university professor Emil Staiger had received a selection of Beck's poems from Ines Leuwen, he praised their “high culture, linguistic mastery, formal perfection” and “diverse subjects”, but they lacked “something difficult to grasp. Perhaps the best way to say it is: the seal of historically unique individuality. ”The volume The Open Face , which in addition to essays also contained poetry, was only published after Beck's death.

Reception of translations, forced new translations

Thomas Mann expressed his appreciation of the gypsy romances in a letter to Beck in 1938 : “With their wildness and delicacy, the poems made a strong impression on me; you feel absolutely nothing of the linguistic constraint that usually attaches to translations of poetry. ”In 1939, Hermann Hesse recommended Beck to the Swiss immigration police as a“ serious poet ”and his translations as“ of high poetic value ”with the aim of bringing him further To enable a stay in Switzerland.

As it became more widespread, so did the criticism of Beck's translation work in the 1950s, with which he initially corresponded to the post-war image of Spain. He was accused of linguistic incompetence and a lack of intercultural translation skills, which would have falsified Lorca's Spain. In 1955 Hans Weigel wrote about a translation of the "unfortunately inevitable Enrique Beck" that it was a "huge obstacle on the way to the development of García Lorca". Rolf Michaelis described Beck in 1969 as a "licorice rasp" and "aunt-like lace maker from Grandpa's theater". He complained that Beck did not resist the temptation "to 'write poetry' instead of translating". In the same year, Klaus Völker , then at the Schauspielhaus Zürich , replied to a letter from the Reiss theater publisher, which had advertised Lorca performances, saying that Beck's broadcasts were always a touch “lyrical” than the original, less binding and mostly specifically German. So much "blood and soil, be it intellectually disguised, does not get the pieces by Lorca". As long as the Lorca translation monopoly exists, “we have no reason to play a play by the Spanish playwright”.

After Beck's death, the translation rights passed to the widow Ines Leuwen. In her will, she established the Heinrich Enrique Beck Foundation, founded in Basel in 1976, as sole heir, which would have been able to dispose of it alone until 2006 - 70 years after Lorca's death. According to the statute, the purpose of the foundation is to disseminate Beck's works, including his Lorca translations and publications on Beck's life.

On Lorca's 100th birthday in 1998, Suhrkamp Verlag announced that it would stop the distribution and distribution of his works in Beck's translation. In this way, Suhrkamp wanted to force new translations in order to fill the German-speaking market for Lorca's work with versions by other translators before the copyright law expired in 2006. At a press conference on May 19, 1998, the publishing house presented Bernarda Albas Haus , translated by Hans Magnus Enzensberger , and Blood Wedding by Rudolf Wittkopf .

A press kit on the Lorca case contained reports that were supposed to prove the poor quality of Beck's transmissions. The expertise of Harald Weinrich and Helmut Frielinghaus received particular attention . Weinrich examined Beck's transmissions of the plays Bernarda Albas Haus und Bluthochzeit as an example : "These translations have serious shortcomings that show up in all areas of language [...]", primarily in grammar , lexicon and style . He summarized: The translation should be seen as "a serious obstacle to reception for the encounter with a classical work of Spanish literature". Lorca has to be translated from scratch. Frielinghaus examined Beck's translation of the poetry cycle Poeta en Nueva York , published in 1963 by Insel Verlag in a bilingual edition under the title Poets in New York . The cycle is infinitely more difficult to access for the German reader than the original Spanish text. This is due to misunderstandings, but also to interpretation and translation errors, but above all to Beck's ideas of "lyrical language". Frielinghaus called his exclusive contract strange and immoral; It is bad and incomprehensible that the translation is still the only legitimate and only one that exists in German. The Heinrich Enrique Beck Foundation finally gave in and allowed other translations.

40 years after his death, the cultural and linguist Ulrike Spieler credited Beck for having made Lorca known to a broad audience in the German-speaking area in general. His cardinal mistake was to have godlike tolerated nothing and nobody next to him. His Spanish exile of almost four years gave him a certain level of language skills, but this did not come close to training as a translator or similar skills. She referred to three breaks in Beck's life: Due to the inflation of the Weimar Republic, he had not been able to study as intended; Spain, which had become his second and real home, had cast him out; he never felt wanted in Switzerland. For Beck, translating was an identity-creating act.

Works

• Ithaca. Text book of the play at the stage publisher Felix Block Erben, around 1962 (unpublished manuscript).
• Poems. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1963.
• The open face. Reiss, Basel 1975 (poems and prose).
• About Lorca. Essays and Notes. Heinrich Enrique Beck Foundation (Ed.), Basel 1981.

Translations (selection)

• Gypsy romances. Stauffacher, Zurich 1938 (Romancero gitano).
• Poems. Rowohlt, Stuttgart 1948.
• Bernarda Alba's house . Women's tragedy in Spanish villages. Felix Bloch Erben, Berlin 1950 (La casa de Bernarda Alba, stage manuscript).
• Blood wedding . Lyrical tragedy in 3 acts and 7 pictures. Insel-Verlag, Wiesbaden 1952 (Bodas de sangre).
• Poetic image - demon - slumber songs. Eugen Diederichs, Düsseldorf, Cologne 1954.
• Granada and other prose poems. Verlag der Arche, Zurich 1954.
• Poetry from the deep inside song. Insel Verlag, Wiesbaden 1956 (Poema del Cante Jondo).
• The little Don Cristóbal retable. Posse for puppet theater. Insel-Verlag, Wiesbaden 1960 (Retablillo de Don Cristóbal).
• Lawsuit against Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. Manus-Presse, Stuttgart 1964 (Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías)
• Letters to friends, interviews, statements on poetry and theater. Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1966.
• About poetry and theater. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1974.

literature

• Ulrike Spieler: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck (= TransÜD . Vol. 67). Frank and Timme, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-7329-0107-4 .
• Ernst Rudin: The poet and his executioner? Lorca's poetry and theater in German translation, 1938–1998 (= European Profiles . Vol. 52). Edition Reichenberger, Kassel 2000, ISBN 978-3-931887-61-2 .
• Gustav Siebenmann: Lorca's reception in the German-speaking area. A distortion. In: ders .: Essays on Spanish Literature . Vervuert, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 978-3-89354-413-4 , pp. 244-272.
• Sibylle Rudin Bühlmann: Enrique Beck. A life for Garcia Lorca. Pendo-Verlag, Zurich 1993, ISBN 3-85842-244-4 .

Web links

• Heinrich Enrique Beck Foundation
• Reto Caluori: Enrique Beck . In: Andreas Kotte (Ed.): Theater Lexikon der Schweiz . Volume 1, Chronos, Zurich 2005, ISBN 3-0340-0715-9 , p. 140.
• Gustav Siebenmann: Lorca in a sham package. In: nzz.ch , September 2, 2008.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ulrike Spieler: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck. Frank and Timme, Berlin 2014, p. 287.
2. ^ Karen Genschow: Federico García Lorca. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-518-18251-2 , p. 9, pp. 118-119.
3. ^ Sibylle Rudin Bühlmann: The youth in Germany. In: dies .: Enrique Beck. A life for Garcia Lorca. Pendo-Verlag, Zurich 1993, pp. 17-24.
4. ↑ Ulrike Spieler: Heinrich Enrique Beck - brief outline of his life. In: dies .: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck. Pp. 285–287, here p. 285.
5. ↑ Ulrike Spieler: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck. P. 187.
6. ^ Sibylle Rudin Bühlmann: Enrique Beck. A life for Garcia Lorca. Pp. 21-30.
7. ↑ Ulrike Spieler: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck. Pp. 170-173.
8. ^ Sibylle Rudin Bühlmann: Enrique Beck. A life for Lorca. Pp. 31-32.
9. ↑ Ulrike Spieler: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck. P. 173.
10. ↑ Ulrike Spieler: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck. Pp. 172-173.
11. ↑ Hans Eckert: Dir. In: Sibylle Rudin Bühlmann: Enrique Beck. Pp. 7–10 (preface).
12. ^ Sibylle Rudin Bühlmann: Enrique Beck. Pp. 42-43.
13. ^ Gustav Siebenmann: Lorca's reception in the German-speaking area. In: ders .: Essays on Spanish Literature. Vervuert, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-89354-413-5 , pp. 244-272, here p. 253.
14. ^ Sibylle Rudin Bühlmann: Enrique Beck. P. 40.
15. ↑ Ulrike Spieler: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck. P. 286.
16. ^ Sibylle Rudin Bühlmann: Enrique Beck. P. 43.
17. ^ Sibylle Rudin Bühlmann: Enrique Beck. Pp. 40-59.
18. ^ Sibylle Rudin Bühlmann: Enrique Beck. Pp. 56-57.
19. ^ Gustav Siebenmann: Lorca's reception in the German-speaking area. In: ders .: Essays on Spanish Literature. Vervuert, Frankfurt am Main 1989, pp. 244-272, here p. 249.
20. ^ Gustav Siebenmann: Lorca's reception in the German-speaking area. A distortion. In: ders .: Essays on Spanish Literature . Frankfurt am Main 1989, p. 256.
21. ↑ Ernst Rudin: The poet and his executioner? Reichenberger, Kassel 2000, p. 3.
22. ↑ Ulrike Spieler: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck. P. 286.
23. ↑ Ulrike Spieler: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck. Pp. 178-181, p. 286.
24. ^ Sibylle Rudin Bühlmann: Enrique Beck. P. 67, pp. 76-80.
25. ^ Artur Nickel: Hans Werner Richter - foster father of group 47. An analysis in the mirror of selected newspaper and magazine articles (= Stuttgart works on German studies . Vol. 290). Academic publisher. Stuttgart 1994, p. 131, p. 338, ISBN 3-88099-294-0 .
26. ↑ Der Spiegel of August 24, 1950, quoted from Ulrike Spieler: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck. P. 179 (footnote); Online version .
27. ↑ Ulrike Spieler: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck. P. 286.
28. ↑ Ulrike Spieler: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck. P. 178.
29. ↑ Ulrike Spieler: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck. P. 179, p. 286.
30. ^ Sibylle Rudin Bühlmann: Enrique Beck. P. 45, pp. 83-85, p. 168.
31. ^ Sibylle Rudin Bühlmann: Enrique Beck. Pp. 91-95.
32. ^ Document 72. Letter from Ines Leuwen to Arnold Hauser, dated December 2, 1973 [copy of the handwritten original]. In: Sibylle Rudin Bühlmann: Enrique Beck. Pp. 187–181, here p. 180.
33. ↑ Ulrike Spieler: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck. P. 184.
34. ↑ Document 73. Dr. Emil Steiger, Professor at the University of Zurich, Hordes to Ines Leuwen [undated, approx. 1973]. In: Sibylle Rudin Bühlmann: Enrique Beck. Pp. 181–182, here p. 181.
35. ↑ Ulrike Spieler: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck. P. 184.
36. ^ Sibylle Rudin Bühlmann: Enrique Beck. P. 43.
37. ↑ Document 25. Letter from Hermann Hesse, Montagnola, to the Aliens Police of February 14th. In: Sibylle Rudin Bühlmann: Enrique Beck . P. 119.
38. ↑ Ernst Rudin: Foreword. In: ders .: The poet and his executioner? P. VII.
39. ↑ Ulrike Spieler: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck. P. 21, p. 215.
40. ^ Sibylle Rudin Bühlmann: Enrique Beck. P. 76.
41. ^ Sibylle Rudin Bühlmann: Enrique Beck. P. 88.
42. ^ Sibylle Rudin Bühlmann: Enrique Beck . Pp. 90-91.
43. ↑ Ulrike Spieler: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck. Pp. 15-16, pp. 287.
44. ↑ Ulrike Spieler: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck. Pp. 19-21.
45. ↑ Ulrike Spieler: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck. Pp. 15-16, pp. 19-21.
46. ↑ Ulrike Spieler: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck. Pp. 289-290 (Appendix D.1).
47. ↑ Ulrike Spieler: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck. P. 305 (Appendix D.2).
48. ^ Gustav Siebenmann: Lorca in a sham package. In: nzz.ch. September 2, 2008, accessed September 12, 2018.
49. ↑ Ulrike Spieler: Translator between identity, professionalism and culturalism: Heinrich Enrique Beck. Berlin 2014. p. 23, pp. 27–28, p. 218, p. 220.

Remarks

1. ^ "Printed with the kind support of the Heinrich Enrique Beck Foundation, Basel, Switzerland." Imprint p. 4 (unpaginated).
2. ↑ "The publication of this book was funded by the Heinrich Enrique Beck Foundation, Basel." Imprint p. 4 (unpaginated).