Young Werther Research Articles

Review Essay: Translating the Untranslatable

J. HILLIS MILLER Review Essay: Translating the Untranslatable Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther; Elective Affinities; Novella, trans. Victor Lange and Judith Ryan, ed. David E. Wellbery. Goethe's Collected Works, Vol. 11. New York: Suhrkamp Publishers New York, Inc., 1988. By a strange fatality (into whose causes it would be interesting to enquire) the German and English terms covering the phenomena discussed in these pages seem never to coincide: they seem always too narrow or too wide — to leave gaps between them or to overlap. 0ames Strachey)1 Traduttore — Traditore! 2 All those interested in Goethe will rejoice in the rapid completion of an authoritative new English translation of "Goethe's Collected Works" in twelve volumes, under the general editorship of Victor Lange, Eric A. Blackall, and Cyrus Hamlin. This is the eleventh volume of this project. It includes a new translation by Judith Ryan of Die Wahlverwandtschaften, revised versions of the translations by Victor Lange oÃ- Die Leiden des fungen Werther and Novelle, and a substantial concluding essay on the three works by David Wellbery. Such projects presuppose that translation can occur, without essential loss, or, to put it more modestly, that it is better for those who do not read German to read Goethe in English translation, whatever the losses, than not to read him at all. My brief remarks here, without challenging those assumptions, attempt to ask what, in the case of these works, may not get carried over in translation. The words "translation" in English and Ãœbertragung in German of course etymologically mean just that: the act of carrying over. I shall center my discussion on Die Wahlverwandtschaften. 270 J. Hillis Miller Walter Benjamin, in his essay on Die Wahlverwandtschaften, writes as follows: "The Elective Affinities has possessed all along a disturbing power [ein trüber Einfluß]. In congenial temperaments [verwandten Gemütern] this may rise to rapturous enthusiasm. In those who are alien to the novel the reaction becomes hostile consternation [widerstrebende Verstörtheit]. Only an indefectible rationality [die unbestechliche Vernunft] is able to cope with it. Under the protection of such rationality the heart may dare to abandon itself to the prodigious, magical beauty of this work."3 Is this "disturbing power," this "prodigious, magical beauty," translatable? Can it be carried over from one language to another? If not, what aspect of the work, exactly, would fail to make it across the gulf from language to language, the gulf supposed to be bridged by translation? Ãœbersetzung is another German word for "translation." The word suggests the act of picking the original meaning up, carrying it across, and then positing or depositing it in the language of the translation. If something essential gets lost on the way, might translation itself not be a form of that "indefectible reason" serving to insulate the reader from the work's disturbing power and beauty in the original? The dust jacket copy for this new translation by Judith Ryan does not stress the disturbing beauty and power of Goethe's novel. Rather the jacket praises the translation for a "freshness" that leads to "enjoyment" in the reader: "Ryan's fresh new translation lets the reader enjoy a text obscured until now by stiffness and formality. " This must be meant as dispraise for the two previous translations into English, that by James Anthony Froude and R. Dillon Boylan, and that by RJ. Hollingdale.4 It might conceivably be argued, however, that something like "stiffness and formality" are, strangely enough, a fundamental part of the power and beauty of the original. These stylistic features, moreover, appear in unexpected parts of the text, not only in the stylizations of the interpolated tale, for example, but in all those oddly detailed discussions of landscape planning, or of chemistry, and in the selections from Ottilie's Journal. The latter sound far less like the diary of a young girl than like the sober maxims of the aging Goethe. In any case, one way to test out this new translation is to set side by side the three translations of key passages, measuring them against the original. But let me ask first whether it is possible to be any more specific...

The Sorrows of Young Werther

The Sorrows of Young Werther

The Sorrows of Young Werther, Elective Affinities, Novella

Prefatory Note ix The Sorrows of Young Werther (translated by Victor Lange) 1 Elective Affinities (translated by Judith Ryan) 89 Novella (translated by Victor Lange) 263 Notes 281 Afterword 283

Emotion and False Consciousness: The Analysis of an Incident from Werther

This article describes the way in which emotion can lead to false consciousness by analysing a single incident in Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. We trace a sequence of events which occur after the hero is humiliated in public, utilizing Helen Lewis's theory of shame dynamics. We argue that such an analysis may led towards models of causality in social science. Our interpretation of class idealization in the mass media, myths and legends, and class shaming in humour suggests that social differentiation between sacred and profane persons may have an emotional basis.

From Mirrors to Images: The Transformation of Sentimental Paradigms in Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther"

From Mirrors to Images: The Transformation of Sentimental Paradigms in Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther"

The relation between depression and art.

The relationships between depression and art are many and varied. Examples of poets, novelists, and musicians spring to mind who have vividly portrayed depression, usually from personal experience of it. These portrayals often had a psychohygienic significance for the artists concerned--as in the case of Goethe, who, in writing 'The sorrows of young Werther', exorcised his own suicidal impulses and thoughts, thus probably saving his own life. Artists have also depicted the physiognomy of depressives, e.g. Hans Baldung Grien in his picture 'Saturn' showing the pronounced nasolabial folds described by Veraguth as indicative of melancholia. Relationships between depression and art also play a role in certain theories of creativity, such as that of Silverman, who postulates that in the depressive phase new impressions arise which then find their expression in a manic phase. Finally, there are the various creative therapies designed in cases of depression (e.g. by encouraging the patient to paint or draw) to reactivate the nondominant hemisphere of the brain. Particularly in chronic or recurrent depressions this reactivation also serves to open up to the patient new perspectives for the solution of the problems that drive him into depression.

Other Worlds: Arishima Takeo and the Bounds of Modern Japanese Fiction , and: The Saga of Dazai Osamu: A Critical Study with Translations (review)

Reviewed by: Other Worlds: Arishima Takeo and the Bounds of Modern Japanese Fiction, and: The Saga of Dazai Osamu: A Critical Study with Translations Sanford Goldstein Paul Anderer . Other Worlds: Arishima Takeo and the Bounds of Modern Japanese Fiction. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. 152 pp. $22.50. Phyllis I. Lyons . The Saga of Dazai Osamu: A Critical Study with Translations. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1985. 410 pp. $38.50. From first to last Paul Anderer's book elucidates a thesis that is at once perceptive and exciting, for with an appealing concentration and specificity the critic establishes his major point and propounds it in a clear-cut analysis of a number of Arishima's stories and two major novels, Aru Onna (A Certain Woman, 1919) and Metro (Labyrinth, 1917). To those acquainted with Japanese literature, from Genji to Tanizaki, from Bashō's haiku to Kawabata, and from tanka to Sōseki and even Mishima, there is the recognition of place, the defined and aesthetic and resilient awareness of geography and culture. But in Arishima (1878-1923), particularly his obsession with "other worlds" outside the traditional view of Japanese territory, we find the beginnings of dislocation in which there are other worlds that do not fit easily and acceptably into the Japanese landscape and, therefore, into the Japanese mind. As Anderer puts it, Hokkaido, the region most associated with Arishima's life, "objectifies . . . the desire to create some turbulent space beyond culture, a space charged with a wild, demonic energy, where new and wholly unexpected actions might take place." And even when the topography is not Hokkaido, be it Tokyo or the sea or America, such a region may find the protagonists in Arishima's fiction enmeshed in a turbulence that offers no relief; the result is a movement toward strangeness, disorder, hallucination, and death. Again and again Arishima "gives shape to that threatening space which opens up when one is cut loose from former habits of thought, and is mentally adrift, prior to any new settlement"; that space "becomes a labyrinth through which a lost mind wanders, grasping at ideas, like 'love' or 'the self,' which in the end prove to possess no more than a fictional substance." Although Anderer is not making a biographical study—the approach taken by much of the earlier criticism of Arishima's work—he shows the impact of Hokkaido on Arishima's development. In 1799 there was not a completed map of Hokkaido's coastline, and by 1871 this region was the only place of deportation in Japan, a place where familiar crops could not be grown and where a kind of melting pot was established for Ainu, samurai, vagrants, and adventurers. Hokkaido's nature was natural scenery as antagonist, a place with no valid cultural resonance. In his psyche and his fiction, Arishima characterized Hokkaido as full of traps and unseen depths. Parallel to this kind of Hokkaido alienation was the alienation of America, for Arishima in 1903 began his three-year stay here. Anderer's long catalogue of books Arishima read, including Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, whose hero Arishima seems to have modeled himself after during his American journey, forms part of the multiple layers of cultural disorientation that helped produce Arishima's other worlds and that eventually led to his suicide in 1923. In spite of numerous natural disasters in Japan, the harmony of nature and the closeness of the Japanese psyche to it have remained a constant source of richness to the Japanese. With Arishima, the disturbing note of an anomaly was [End Page 861] poignantly registered, and his "geography" with its other worlds so removed from the traditional Japanese world could not but affect his characters and deprive them of their sanity, their ability to pass safely through, their life force. Always dramatic yet rationally written, Anderer's study offers creative insight into one of Japan's first literary iconoclasts, and his minute and exciting examinations of A Certain Woman and Labyrinth entice us to read the novels, though only the former has been fully translated. For Americans, the startling new voice calling attention to Japan's defeat came in Dazai Osamu's The Setting Sun...

Goethe and prehistory

In this fascinating article, the Professor of Archaeology in the University of Exeter shows us that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was not only the author of Faust, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and of beautiful lyrics, ballads and love-songs, but was keenly interested in prehistory and was well abreast of the subject as it was developing in Germany in the early nineteenth century.

Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir (review)

276 biography Vol. 6, No. 3 memory, to allow the self, as Picasso once put it, to begin at zero with each new creation. She spoke for those writers of autobiographical fiction who were, indeed, trying to create an identity as a writer but who were not trying to write a story of their own life, and who rejected identity rooted in history. Spengemann defends ahistorical autobiography ; but it may seem to some readers that autobiography divorced from history is impossible. As an introduction to autobiography as genre, Spengemann's book, however, is valuable both for its sensible reading of major texts—Grace Abounding, The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Prelude, for example—and its willingness to deal with the problem of modern autobiography . A most important contribution is a lengthy (more than seventy pages) bibliographical essay which offers a critical overview of standard and recent works dealing with autobiography in general, and an extended discussion of works pertaining directly to the texts Spengemann explores. Linda Simon Emory University Notes 1. In Gertrude Stein, Writings and Lectures 1909-1945, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz. Baltimore : Penguin, 1974, pp. 148-56. 2. "Portraits and Repetition," in Meyerowitz, op.cit., p. 102. Eileen Simpson, Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1982. 262 pp. $15.50. In Life Is Elsewhere Milan Kundera paints a decidedly cynical picture of the genesis of a poet. According to Kundera, the moment this young Werther's vocation is born can be pinpointed precisely: It was turning dark, Dad was not coming home, and it occurred to Maman that Jaromil's face was full of a gentle beauty which no artist or husband could match. This improper thought was so insistent that she could not free herself of it. . . . Then she told him that literature had always been her greatest love. She had even gone to the university mainly to study literature and it was only marriage (she did not say pregnancy ) that prevented her from devoting herself to this deepest inclination . If she now saw Jaromil as a poet (yes, she was the first to pin this REVIEWS 277 great title on him), it is a wonderful surprise, and yet it is also something she had long expected. They found consolation in one another, these two unsuccessful lovers, mother and son, and talked far into the night. The crucible—read womb—of art for Jaromil lies in his mother's suffocating devotion. And he, a classic Puer aeternus, returns this hothouse love in kind, obligingly dying young—that is, before he has had a chance to be thoroughly unfaithful—to please her. You don't have to be a graduate of the C. G. Jung Institute to spot that the young poets of Eileen Simpson's memoir—principally, John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, and Robert Lowell—were all men either devoured by or hopelessly consecrated to (pick your favorite guilty party) their mothers. This shared psychological orientation, it seems clear, and not the travails of serving a Romantic muse, produced three difficult, prematurely ended lives as well as the alcoholism and madness that accompanied them. Simpson, who was married to Berryman, has created a muted, pastel word sketch of these men—one which might have disappointed her subjects (themselves so avid to hear the worst about their literary heroes) by its studious avoidance of voyeuristic detail. The book is so tasteful, in fact, that it is difficult at first to understand why Eileen Simpson has written it. Surely not as exorcism: feelings are described, not evoked; one senses that key scenes have been censored, much ugliness glossed over (though who, having loved a person going slowly and hopelessly mad, has the superhuman strength to retrace every step of that sad lost footpath now filling up with dead leaves?) Ultimately, however, Simpson divorces her emotions so totally from the painful episodes of the past that a reader feels no sense of catharsis, only a trailing off, by book's end. Did she write it, then, to set the record straight? Character is portrayed sporadically and mostly by anecdote; since none of the lives is followed through completely, no fully developed portraits—not even the one of...

Werther's Suicide: Instinct, Reasons and Defense

Goethe's Sufferings of Young Werther probably contains most famous in literature. To be sure, Gundolf thinks that for public, for masses, whole novel was only preparation and explanation of sensational suicide, which had aroused their interest in first place, while for Goethe novel was story of his own sufferings and only their symbolic conclusion, more technical than intrinsic in nature.' Korff, however, rightly maintains that it was not through misunderstanding that public received Goethe's novel as a novel about suicide, for is innermost idea of whole work. And another critic calls Werther's the principal theme, most important event and climax of whole development.3 Yet there is no agreement on reason or reasons for of young man. Some, like Stuart Atkins, even find that the question of what are ultimate causes of Werther's is left unanswered.4 Barker Fairley equally thinks that Werther's is essentially unmotivated.' Most readers, including some scholars, blame unrequited love for young man's drastic step.6 Others see in Werther's his attempt to perpetuate fulfillment of his love, which he allegedly reached embracing Lotte for a few moments.7 Yet others ascribe Werther's to his disordered mind or to his professional disappointment, and some even consider it a consequence of his religious feeling. Probably oddest reason was adduced by Leslie Fiedler, who (seriously?) stated that the celebration of suicide was the only possible consummation for young man afraid that sex may harden into marriage. Goethe enumerated in Dichtung und Wahrheit a series of general, social and literary conditions which encouraged thoughts of in young men of Werther period. It can be easily demonstrated that these factors play no part or hardly any part in Werther's case.9 Indeed, Goethe later retracted explanation given in his autobiography. In a conversation with Eckermann he held that neither general conditions of time nor certain English authors but individual unhappy experiences were responsible agents, and that everybody has or should have such sufferings (535) .1o It is no wonder that psychology, psychoanalysis, and social psychology have been applied or can be applied to Goethe's novel, which has been called forerunner of modem psychological novel,'1 in order to find out about Werther's innermost feelings, nature of his sufferings, and particularly motives for his suicide.

“Monasticism” and the Paradox of the Meiji Higher Schools

When Nitobe Inazō became principal of the First Higher School (Ichikoō) in the fall of 1906, he was immediately perplexed by the customs and rituals of his students. Here on the campus of Japan's most prestigious university preparatory school was an isolated community of students immersed in a subculture that seemed totally unrestricted by the mores of civilized twentieth-century society. There was a “rustic barbarism” in the students' daily behavior as they swaggered around the campus in worn-out uniforms and battered geta, bellowing out incoherent lyrics of “dormitory songs.” No one thought twice about using a sleeve for a handkerchief, or making “dormitory rain” from the second-story windows of the residence halls (instead of using the appropriate ground-floor facilities.) At night, some students might be seen stripped down to their underpants and dancing wildly around open bonfires, while others were strolling aimlessly through the grove in front of the dormitory, intoning lines from Hamlet or The Sorrows of Young Werther. For Nitobe—the Christian theologian, the international diplomat, the impeccably well-dressed and wellmannered gentleman—the first sight of the Ichikō students was something of a shock. How strange it was that those young men destined to become the leaders of an emerging world power should be conducting themselves in a way that seemed, on the surface at least, to be in proud defiance of the codes of civic responsibility and social acceptability.

“Monasticism” and the Paradox of the Meiji Higher Schools

When Nitobe Inazō became principal of the First Higher School (Ichikoō) in the fall of 1906, he was immediately perplexed by the customs and rituals of his students. Here on the campus of Japan's most prestigious university preparatory school was an isolated community of students immersed in a subculture that seemed totally unrestricted by the mores of civilized twentieth-century society. There was a “rustic barbarism” in the students' daily behavior as they swaggered around the campus in worn-out uniforms and batteredgeta, bellowing out incoherent lyrics of “dormitory songs.” No one thought twice about using a sleeve for a handkerchief, or making “dormitory rain” from the second-story windows of the residence halls (instead of using the appropriate ground-floor facilities.) At night, some students might be seen stripped down to their underpants and dancing wildly around open bonfires, while others were strolling aimlessly through the grove in front of the dormitory, intoning lines fromHamletorThe Sorrows of Young Werther. For Nitobe—the Christian theologian, the international diplomat, the impeccably well-dressed and wellmannered gentleman—the first sight of the Ichikō students was something of a shock. How strange it was that those young men destined to become the leaders of an emerging world power should be conducting themselves in a way that seemed, on the surface at least, to be in proud defiance of the codes of civic responsibility and social acceptability.

Goethe's Werther after two centuries

Goethe's novel The Sufferings of Young Werther appeared two centuries ago; it was published anonymously at Leipzig in September 1774. In the jargon of our day it became an immediate best seller, perhaps the first in world literature. Since there were at that time no book clubs, no television talk shows, no paperback or motion picture rights, no literary cocktail parties, its author (whose identity soon leaked out) was spared those trials and triumphs which his twentieth-century descendants must endure. But his book did enjoy a popularity till then unknown in the history of literature. Two new reprints were issued before the year was out; a French translation appeared within a few months and many more followed; there were translations into English, Russian, and many other European languages. Poems, novels, dramas, musicals, operas, chapbooks were produced dealing with aspects of Werther. Among the notable works of literature that showed the influence of Goethe's novel were Benjamin Constant's Adolphe, Chateaubriand's René, Ugo Foscolo's Jacopo Ortis, Senancour's Obermann, Mickiewicz' Dziady, Flaubert's Education sentimentale. Lamartine, Sainte Beuve, Musset acknowledged the influence of Werther on their early careers. Of the three extant Werther operas, Massenet's (1892) is a major work of art. A Werther film was produced in France in 1938. André Maurois devoted one of his three essays in Méipe (1926) to a retelling of the Werther story. Thomas Mann treated the Werther aftermath in his outstanding novel, Lotte in Weimar (1939).

The Sufferings of Young Werther

The Sufferings of Young Werther

The Form of the Sentimental Novel

Most discussions of sentimental literature, taking their lead from Goldsmith's Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy, center on matters of content and atmosphere-especially the prevalence of tears, whether those of the characters or the audience. But sentiment on stage is not equivalent to sentiment in the novel, nor can the most striking formal characteristics of the fiction being written in the 1760's and 1770's be illuminated by invocations of such philosophic doctrines as Shaftesbury's benevolism. Through a discussion of the form of sentimental fiction, I would like to suggest that such works as Tristram Shandy, The Man of Feeling, and The Sorrows of Young Werther were neither the resurgence of a cultural stream that had somehow gone underground for almost half a century, nor part of an essentially discontinuous novelistic tradition. They show instead both a structural and a thematic continuity with earlier eighteenthcentury novelists, and with the work of Pope and Swift, that is more central to the best of sentimental literature than any continuity with the themes, plot turns, and moral atmosphere of late seventeenthand early eighteenth-century drama. A convenient foil to my view is the frequent assertion, however qualified, that the form of the novel had become so established in the little more than twenty-five years between Pamela and Tristram Shandy that Sterne could already freely experiment with all the givens of the well-made novel, including its typographical conventions. In this literary-historical commonplace, formal balance and circumstantial realism are the assumed standards; sentiment, gothidsm, and Sterne are the deviations, to be explained more by reference to the history of ideas than the history of the novel. At best the change is explained as a revolt against realism: the critic defines sub-genres and asks us to sit back and wait for Jane Austen. But I would like to argue that Sterne, among others, is not upending but extending the essential self-definition of the novel in England, and I would like to show how a literary form whose first appearance trailed banners of fidelity to real life and moral correctness could metamorphose into Sterne's elaborate formal games and the discovered manuscripts of Walpole and Mackenzie. Structure in the sentimental novel strives to imitate feeling rather than intellect, and to embody direct experience rather than artistic premeditation; this basic imperative of the novel from Defoe on is only made a little more apparent in the works of Sterne, Mackenzie, and others. The form of the sentimental novel, the gothic novel, and eighteenth-century fiction in general never seriously imitates such non-literary fictions as the order of providence, philosophic system, or social hierarchy, no matter how it may comment on them or include their patterns

The Sufferings of Young Werther

The Sufferings of Young Werther

The Sufferings of Young Werther

The Sufferings of Young Werther

The Sufferings of Young Werther

The Sufferings of Young Werther

The Sorrows of Young Werther

The Sorrows of Young Werther