554 Reviews the Divan, the so-called Pindar-Fragmente suggest themselves particularly. Like the Divan, they ostensibly elucidate verse with prose, their verse is somewhere between translation and original text, they are explicitly concerned with origins and returning to sources, and like the Divan they open up and explore the idea of translation itself. In the second part of the book Nicoletti turns to the Divan itself,beginning with a close reading of 'Ubersetzungen' and going on to explore the links with other prose sections. She shows that they can all be understood to flow out of and feed into it, and multiplies the metaphors that, again in Romantic fashion, expand and diversify the meaning oftranslation. By attending to translation as journey, interpretation, oriental ism , intercourse, tradition, commerce, and cipher, Nicoletti reveals the allusiveness, complexity, and interconnectedness of the prose part of the Divan. It is possible to see itas a translation of Goethe's firstkind, which 'macht uns in unserm eigenen Sinne mit dem Auslande bekannt'; and the Divan as a whole, prose and verse, as a hermeneutic 'west-east' journey in the footsteps of real travellers (many of whom are celebrated in the Noten und Abhandlungen), a journey which in the end goes further than they had, forit is Nicoletti's contention that the lyrics are a version of Goethe's third kind of translation, in which, he says, original and translation are somehow 'identisch'. In the course of all this the term translation is stretched and reworked to very near the limit, if there is one, and is sometimes in danger of spiralling out of sig? nificance. That it can stand for so many differenttypes of relation is a large part of its strength, but when Nicoletti comes on to the lyrics one might expect the concept to be earthed to the specifics of a practice, by looking at those poems which are, or derive from, translations of oriental originals. Admirably in some ways, she refuses to do this, preferring to treat the whole corpus as translations of the third kind, hovering then between literary translation and translation in some other sense, and reading the poems as the place of a 'gegenseitige Befruchtung der Kulturen' (p. 331) whose language moves towards 'eine[] verlorene[] Ursprache' (p. 376). What she says is thought-provoking, and makes good sense of the otherwise mysterious nature of Goethe's claims forhis third kind of translation. But in the end it is perhaps no more than to circumscribe the poetic language of the Divan poems, without really attending to the fact that the means are poetic, that we are dealing with forms of illusion. It is also disconcerting that Goethe himself, in 'Ubersetzungen', does seem to have actual literary translation in mind, referringto Voss and to interlinear versions. None the less Nicoletti has added to the ways of seeing and reading the Divan and in particular opened up the sometimes difficultterrain ofthe prose sections. The going in the book itself is not easy, but there is a lot in it that clarifies the ground covered by the Divan. The Queen's College, Oxford Charlie Louth Goethe und das Zeitalter der Romantik. Ed. by Walter Hinderer. (Stiftung fiir Romantikforschung, 21) Wiirzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann. 2002. 524 pp. ?39. ISBN 3-8260-2303-x. With the assistance of Alexander von Bormann, Gerhart von Graevenitz, Gerhard Neumann, Gunter Oesterle, and Dagmar Ottmann, Walter Hinderer has published the proceedings of the international symposium devoted to the topic of 'Goethe und das Zeitalter der Romantik' that took place on 11-14 November 1999 at Princeton University. As may well have been pointed out during the conference, these dates coincide with the 200th anniversary of the Romantikertreffenin Jena?an event signalling the rise of a new generation in German literature and culture that drew inspi? ration from Goethe, their older contemporary, to be sure, but also set out in different artistic, philosophical, religious, and political directions. In this regard, Hinderer has MLRy 100.2, 2005 555 chosen a fine title for his contribution to the scholarship occasioned by the 250th anniversary of the birth of Goethe, in that it simultaneously evokes and avoids the hoary designation of an 'Age of...