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More Articles in This Series

Paul Hiebert, a Manitoba Legend

Sarah Binks Translates Heine.

About Sarah Binks, AKA Paul Hiebert
The story of how Paul Hiebert has been able to fool people into believing that his Sarah Binks is real rather than a figment of his lively imagination.

Sarah Binks, Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan

by Traute Klein, AKA biogardener

The genius of Paul Hiebert created himself an alias in the farm girl Sarah Binks through whom he was able to parodise rural prairie life without alienating his audience.

Paul Hiebert was a University of Manitoba Chemistry professor. He combined his love for his native German with his flair for entertaining to create masterpieces of comedic translation of the poetry of Heinrich Heine. If you did not yet read my article on Hiebert, you may want to do that before you go on with this one. I call it, "Paul Hiebert, a Manitoba Legend."

He created a mouthpiece for himself to express his views on the rural backdrop of the Canadian prairies, especially of southerm Manitoba with its predominantly Mennonite population. To make sure that no one would fault him for his humorous stereotypical portrayal of characters around him, he speaks through a young woman, Sarah Binks, and he places her in Saskatchewan, miles removed from southern Manitoba.

My first introduction to Hiebert happened in a second year German class at the University of Manitoba, when Professor Maurer read from Paul Hiebert's Sarah Binks. This being a German class, he picked the chapter where Sarah attempts to transate German poetry without knowing a word of German. I cannot remember ever having laughed as hard as I did that day.

Here is the scenario:

Sarah Binks had a neighbor friend of German ancestry by the unlikely name of Mathilda Schwantzhacker ("Mighty Tail Chopper"). Mathilda, like Paul, grew up speaking German at home, singing German folksongs and reciting German poetry.

"Sarah knew no German, but Mathilda taught her some of the songs, the words and melodies at least, without much regard to their meaning. Sarah's mind was always awake to any poetic opportunity. She borrowed Kurt Schwantzhacker's dictionary and translated. Several of these translations have come down to us, but they have been omitted from the anthologies of Sarah's works as not being truly representative of Sarah and Saskatchewan, and may, in fact, represent the combined efforts of Sarah and Mathilda."

Why did Paul Hiebert place the story in Saskatchewan rather than in his own stamping ground of Manitoba? Here is my guess. Manitobans at the time thought of themselves as being more cultured than the population of Saskatchewan, so placing his parodies in rural Saskatchewan would make his stories more credible. In the last article of this series, I show that Paul has been able to fool some of his readers into thinking of Sarah Binks as real.