The Wedding of Radul Vlašić

Abstract

In January 1827, a serbian poem enters into the conversation between johann wolfgang von goethe and his faithful scribe, johann peter eckermann, who writes, “Mit diesen Worten reichte er mir eine Übersetzung eines serbischen Gedichtes von Herrn Gerhard. . . . Das Gedicht führte den Titel ‘Die Gefängnisschlüssel‘” (“[With these words he] handed to me a translation by Herr Gerhard of a Serbian poem. . . . It was entitled The Prison-Key”; Eckermann 195; Goethe 131). The following week, the two men's conversation returns to the Serbian poem; in the published record of their discussion, the poem is mentioned in the same passage that contains the first appearance in print of the term Weltliteratur (“world literature” [Eckermann 198; Goethe 133]). The original poem on which the translation is based has curiously remained unnamed in Gespräche mit Goethe (Conversations with Goethe)—and it has not yet been named in the large body of Goethe scholarship until now. In the edited volume of Gespräche, one finds a note appended to Eckermann's reference to “Die Gefängnisschlüssel” (“Prison Key”). It clarifies that the title of the German translation of the unnamed original Serbian poem is not “Die Gefängnisschlüssel,” as Eckermann recorded it, but “Die Kerkerschlüssel” (“Dungeon Key” [734]). The latter appears in Gerhard's Wila: Serbische Volkslieder und Heldenmährchen (Vila: Serbian Folk Songs and Heroic Tales), published in 1828. The recovered title of the original Serbian poem is ( “The Wedding of Radul Vlašć”). While world-literary approaches to Gespräche have largely focused on the unnamed Chinese novel that, like the Serbian poem, appears in the same passage in Gespräche as Weltliteratur, this introduction traces how the Orientalist production of the phrase Weltliteratur takes two forms: one in reference to the Chinese novel, the other in reference to the Serbian poem.