Early this morning, I finally achieved one of my lifetime goals: I finished reading Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther." I'm not sure why it took so long; it's not that demanding a book. I was drawn to it as a kid when I heard that the fate of the young hero set off a wave of copycat suicides in Europe. I was too young at the time to read it, I suppose, and put it off, then somehow lost track of the notion.
Learning German, it came to mind again, and I found a cheap paperback copy. But by the time my German became good enough to take it on, the idea had somehow slipped away again. I chipped away at a few pages from time to time, but years passed, and my German fell into disuse, and I lost the nerve for the project. But teaching for the last few years has put some polish back on my German, and I finally took a crack at it this summer. Then school started, and a few other books intervened, but I finally finished it off this morning.
Was it worth the wait? Maybe not. Werther's sensibility is a bit too far removed from our own to feel all that much sympathy for his plight. Pull yourself together, man, my inner critic kept saying. And I found the long recitation from "Ossian" near the end a needless, and language challenging, distraction. But, by God, I made it.
And just in time. Now that suicides are the stuff of internet entertainment, not just Sturm und Drang novels, Goethe will never seem the same again.
UPDATE: If you don't think the world is quite a sick enough place, scroll through the comments for the link above. Trust me, the world is plenty sick enough.
Funny thing is, so many smart people like Goethe were taken in by "Ossian," which was supposed to be a lost Scottish epic, discovered rather like Joe Smith's golden tablets, and "translated" into modern English.
ReplyDeleteSamuel Johnson knew better. Asked if he really thought a contemporary man could have written Ossian, Johnson replied, "Yes. Many men. Many women. And many children."