JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Sufferings of Young Werther
A New Translation by Stanley Corngold
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
NEW YORK | LONDON
CONTENTS
Translator’s Introduction
The Sufferings of Young Werther
BOOK ONE
BOOK TWO
Translator’s Acknowledgment
TRANSLATOR'S
INTRODUCTION
YOUNG GOETHE wrote The Sufferings of Young Werther in four weeks in spring 1774, a hot outpouring of genius; the book was swiftly printed and sold at the Leipzig fair that fall. If it was thrilling for this twenty-five-year-old footloose lawyer and dilettante to know that his novel was being bought, pirated, read, translated, and imitated throughout Europe, it was to become a burden as he matured into Privy Councillor Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—diplomat, scientist, literary giant, and maker of prudent maxims; forever after, Goethe was to be known as the author of Young Werther and identified with his suicidal hero. Goethe saw this danger early and furnished a second edition in 1775 with a poem that ends in italic, “Be a man, and do not follow me [to my doom].” The danger was real, as Goethe himself acknowledged: Werther “is a creation . . . that I, like the pelican, fed with the blood of my own heart. . . . I am uneasy when I look at it and dread the return of the pathological condition from which it sprang.” At the end of his life, he spoke ruefully of the novel’s “fire rockets” that continued to flare up in and around him for half a century.
Werther is himself—this self-absorbed, provincial youth in a German novel. At the same time he anticipates a recurring type: the late-adolescent, elite-educated, hormone-besotted, rebellious youth with artistic inclinations who would rather be in love—and who then promptly falls in love with the wrong woman. But Werther would not seize our imagination now were it not for his “gift,” as Goethe wrote, “for profound and pure feeling and true penetration.” And once created and given voice, what a gifted presenter of himself this Werther is! As readers, we wrestle with the paradox of how someone—Werther—can claim to be so lost, so disconsolate, so barren of speech and feeling and yet find his way to the words that make his struggle unforgettable. At the end, of course, Goethe needs to have the Editor step in for Werther, to give an account of a disintegrating character in a different sort of language—a pedantic, official-sounding, propriety-upholding language—implying that Werther was no longer able to speak for himself. But even here, when Werther’s letters and notebooks are quoted, his words remain vivid and gripping even as he laments.
For much of the novel, Werther cannot find his way; his thoughts, his longings, his talents exceed anything he thinks the world can offer him as a worthwhile object of pursuit, and at times we may be inclined to agree. True, that worthy object might be his beloved Lotte, but she is by definition unavailable; she is engaged to another, a deserving man. For the rest, work in government, at the ambassador’s office, is a plague, dry as dust and continually checked and interfered with by that dreaded figure, one’s “superior.” Entry into aristocratic society is soon enough proved fruitless—and humiliating—when Werther, a bourgeois, thoughtlessly wanders into it. There is art—in the beginning Werther seems to be a capable draughtsman—but soon his talents fail him; in this case, the object of his art, Nature, is an object not too small but too big; he is prone to be overwhelmed by landscape—by hills and peaks and floods. And here, where Nature has ceased to be the object of the painter’s masterful art, it can become a demon too, offering, in its domination of the individual mind, a tempting alternative to consciousness: unconsciousness, ecstasy, self-loss. Franz Kafka, whose work is shot through with reminiscences of Werther—and who admitted his dependence on Goethe—wrote of the life-task: “not to shunt off the ego but consume it,” which defines the artist’s task especially: to seize all the ego’s energies, longings, hurts, passions and burn them as fuel for the higher project—the work of art. This is Goethe’s view and Goethe’s task but not one that Werther can perform; the declared object of his art is Nature, and Nature is too chaotic, a provocation to shake off the self in death—the bigger ecstasy. And this is what, in the end, Goethe deplores and writes his Werther to steel himself against—the dreadful vision, as in Werther’s great letter of August 18, 1771, of “the spectacle of infinite life transformed before my eyes into the abyss of an ever open grave.”
The text that follows is a translation, an effortful attempt to capture the always astonishing liveliness of Goethe’s language. Like the best wines of those years, it still keeps its fruit, its freshness—it breathes, it lives. For if Werther is an event for Goethe the writer, a breakthrough into a career as a literary hero, it is much more: it is a breakthrough for German literary language. You cannot find an earlier German literary work that displays such a range of subjective experience in words that are transparent to this experience and arranged in so convincing a word order. Werther marks an achievement of truly world-historical proportions: in this furnace of linguistic activity, we see the modern German literary language being forged. Goethe’s novel became a constant source of inspiration to younger contemporaries, glorious in their German prose, such as Friedrich Hölderlin, the author of another great epistolary novel—Hyperion—that richly repays reading today, not to mention the more familiar, grand inheritors, such as Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Kafka.
Mann is especially worth noting for Werther-lovers as the author of Lotte in Weimar, a magical reconstruction of a visit many decades later by Charlotte Kestner née Buff, the model of Werther’s Lotte, to Weimar, the residence of the mature and very grand person Werther had become. This is Privy Councillor von Goethe, the Duke’s right hand. In Mann’s imagination, Lotte and Goethe do not meet; Goethe keeps his distance from her, although in historical fact he did invite her to dinner. Nonetheless, in Mann’s account, we have a sign of Goethe’s strenuous distancing of himself from Werther’s passion, beginning, of course, with the heightened role of the lawyerly Editor in Book II of the novel and then the fine adjustments of tone in the “definitive” edition of 1787, which is the basis of this translation.
In early days, in 1775, Goethe had depicted the inaccessible Charlotte Buff as an object worthy of throwing a young man into a life-and-world-denying frenzy. She is adorable. It was easier for Goethe to generate a proper distance in 1816, when, in the words of his soul mate, another Charlotte—Charlotte von Stein—he was “recently visited by Lotte from The Sufferings of Werther, Mrs. Kestner from Hanover. [. . .] She is pleasant company, but of course no Werther would shoot himself anymore for her.”
But none of these retrospective withdrawals of sympathy have been able to extinguish in readers the most immediate relation to, and love of, Werther—especially in Book I—dashing in his buff-colored trousers and vest, high boots, and blue frock coat. Certainly not Napoleon, who, on Goethe’s visit to him in Erfurt in 1808, declared that he had read the novel seven times. Furthermore, as proof of the fact, Napoleon produced an allegedly profound analysis of the novel, including one objection. In certain passages (which we leave to the reader to discover), he minded Goethe’s mingling two motives as causes of his hero’s death: passionate love and also frustrated ambition. This entanglement, declared Napoleon, was not “true to nature” and diminished the reader’s impression of the overpowering influence on Werther of his unrequited love. “Why did you do that?” Napoleon asked, whereupon Goethe, always the practical diplomat, had an answer. A writer, he replied, might be excused for employing a trick from time to time in order to bring about effects he did not feel able to produce in a direct
and natural way. What Goethe was declaring with this excuse to Napoleon was the German author’s independence of French models of strict unity in exposition; Goethe’s early model was Shakespeare and not the great French dramatists Racine and Corneille. Furthermore, Goethe meant to portray the grief of the sons of the bourgeoisie at the spiritless, joyless prospect of the empty activity available to them in the Germany of their time. “In a fit of morose arrogance,” such people, as he drily wrote, might very well “become acquainted with the thought that if life no longer suited them, they could in any case, and as they wished, take leave of it.”
Werther produces an effect of spontaneous genius, but it remains remarkable how beautifully structured it is. It is divided into two “Books”—a Book One full of some hope and joy, set in early 1771, and a Book Two full of increasing melancholy and doom, ending in 1772. Werther’s growing despair is correlated with a wintry season: he shoots himself on the verge of Christmas, in a gesture full of overdetermined meaning. He has repeatedly likened his grief to that of Christ; that grief is deeply, darkly exaggerated by his refusing the gesture of hope accompanying Christ’s birth; but, as he repeatedly declares, Christ’s death is also the promise of a higher life, and in this way Werther suggests that his death is also an entry into a higher sphere, in which he hopes to find his beloved Lotte again—and her mother and Albert only secondarily.
Again and again his dire end is forecast, plainly and symbolically: early on he speaks of the freedom that is reserved for every man and woman, for one can choose to leave this earthly prison. In a symbolic sense, Werther’s sudden perception, as early as Book I, of Nature as a monster forever devouring and regurgitating its own creatures points toward his own wild moods and suicidal impulses. His swapping his beloved Homer’s famous luminousness and celebration of life for the (apocryphal) works of a gloomy, death-drunk Gaelic poet called Ossian forecasts a downward drift of the spirit. Werther identifies his own plight with a madman and a murderer, both of whom he defends, but here his generosity of spirit seems tainted by what is called nostalgie de la boue, the ascription of higher spiritual value to social outcasts and derelicts.
This foreshadowing of his own doom through identification with the doomed has the effect of driving forward the reader’s attention to Werther’s fate: it is part of the general onward-rushing character of the entire story. This thrust forward, almost impatience, is a feature of Werther’s character as well as of his language. From time to time he sets up elaborate rhetorical constructions marked by periodic rhythm, but he cannot end them properly. More noticeable is his habit of merely writing the word “and” between two moments of perception that are actually opposed and normally call for an expression signaling this opposition, such as “but” or “while” or “on the other hand.” The reader is left to intuit the contrast. Other translations supply the oppositional word where logic seems to call for it; the present translation does not; the book’s associative, paratactic rush makes a point. Werther is, by his own admission, “restless and unfortunate,” and so is his style restless and unfortunate from the standpoint of the requirements of logic. The pattern of his writing is the punctual equivalence of moments of experience—and subordination be damned. It is not—good Lord!—that Werther lacks the evolved intelligence or the linguistic maturity capable of hypotaxis, that is, the regular use of well-structured subordinate clauses—he has had a classical education and he is well-informed about the technical jargon of aesthetics in his day; but his rush past logic is expressive of the irrational drive that hurls him from one totally gripping emotional-intellectual instant to the next.
In translating Werther, I have held to the principle that I sketched out in my translation of Kafka’s Selected Stories published as a Norton Critical Edition. It is enunciated by John Donne in 1624, soon after a team of forty-seven scholars had finished their work, in 1611, of translating canonical Greek, Hebrew, and Latin texts into what was to be called the King James Bible. Donne wrote: “God employs several translators.” It is with some hesitation, of course, that one evokes the idea of translating Werther under the head of translating the Word of God, since Goethe, great as he is, is by common consent the lesser writer. Still, The Sufferings of Young Werther is very great, a greatness in fact owed in good part to its personal—and even heretical—deployment of biblical language and Christian ideas; and indeed it even served as the bible to the many young men and women in the late eighteenth century who imitated the thought and style of Werther and Lotte—and to the dozen or so who imitated Werther’s death.
My translation principle requires me to translate each page “cold” and then, after many passes, consult the many other extant translations. For it is my firm belief that translators should stand on the shoulders of their predecessors. We are, after all, a collective—translators and readers alike; we are one community in our devotion to the most truthful possible understanding of the works of this master writer, an understanding that in every case involves a personal “rewriting” of the text. If one were writing an essay on Werther, would one make a point of never consulting any previous writer who had written on Werther? Of course not. And should one as a translator fail to consult any or all previous translations of Werther? Of course not. But then the question of the originality of one’s reading or writing about the author could arise. There is a well-documented practice in the matter of attributing phrases and formulations cited from the works of previous writers: you footnote them. And what is the right thing to do if as a translator you encounter in a previous translation a rendering that is straightforwardly better than your own? Ignore this knowledge for the sake of a putative absolute originality? No. But how can you indicate your debt now and again to your inspired predecessor? You cannot footnote this or that phrase. And so here I wish to compose a blanket dedication to the predecessors whose work has, in the words once more of Kafka, “refreshed, satisfied, liberated, and exalted me” and I hope you too, reader. Chief among them are Stanley Applebaum, Catherine Hutter, Victor Lange, Elizabeth Mayer and Louise Bogan, Clark Muenzer, Burton Pike, and Harry Steinhauer.
In saying that I have not hesitated on occasion to employ the locutions of other translators when they seemed better than my own, I should note, in this vexed matter of “originality,” that all too often, with both delight and despair, I found I had hit upon exactly the same formulations as my predecessors. That is inevitably the case, because Goethe’s syntax is usually quite clear, his word choice is not recherché, and key words recur. Again and again, there are simply no two ways about it. In one important respect, the text lends itself to literal English translation: this is the above-mentioned factor of parataxis, the direct, forward-moving, “and . . . and” structure of Werther’s thought. And here we confront once more the major drive of the work itself, so distinctive as a full, phenomenologically saturated presentation of a self informed by the most intense desire to annihilate itself. This tension dictates the widest task of the translator: to find a language at once Apollonian—firmly delineated, intelligent, full of light and enlightenment—and Dionysian—dark, death-driven—a concept employed by Nietzsche, Goethe’s great admirer, in thinking about him. Some of this darkness might be conveyed by an impression of foreignness now and again in this translation, the result of following the German text very closely and never knowingly choosing to use a word that was not current in English ca. 1787.
You find the claim, here and there in the critical literature, that the language and style of Werther has long ceased to be a model for anything a twenty-first-century writer would write. It may have captivated his contemporaries and Nietzsche and even Mann and Kafka, but that was then. I was prepared to believe this claim until I came across this passage in a work by an eminent contemporary novelist, the Nobel Prize–winning J. M. Coetzee. In his autobiographical novel Youth, published in 2002, we find this description of the hero:
Tired out, one Sunday afternoon, he folds his jacket into a pillow, stretches out on the greensward,
and sinks into a sleep or half-sleep in which consciousness does not vanish but continues to hover. It is a state he has not known before: in his very blood he seems to feel the steady wheeling of the earth. The faraway cries of children, the birdsong, the whirr of insects gather force and come together in a paean of joy. His heart swells. At last! he thinks. At last it has come, the moment of ecstatic unity with the All! Fearful that the moment will slip away, he tries to put a halt to the clatter of thought, tries simply to be a conduit for the great universal force that has no name.
Thus are the detractors of Werther’s perennial influence confuted.
Stanley Corngold
Berlin, January 2011
I have diligently collected everything I could discover about the story of poor Werther and set it before you here, knowing that you will thank me for it. You will not be able to withhold your admiration and love for his spirit and character or your tears for his fate.
And you, good soul, who feel the same urgency as he, take comfort from his sufferings and let this little book be your friend if by fate or your own fault you can find none closer to you.
BOOK ONE
MAY 4, 1771
HOW HAPPY I am to be away! Dearest friend, what a thing it is, the human heart! To leave you, whom I love so much, from whom I was inseparable, and yet to be happy! I know you will forgive me. Weren’t my other attachments especially chosen by fate just to torment a heart like mine? Poor Leonore! And yet I was innocent. Was it my fault that while her sister’s willful charms were keeping me so pleasantly entertained, passion formed in her poor heart? And yet—am I entirely innocent? Didn’t I nourish her feelings? Didn’t I delight in those genuine expressions of her nature that so often made us laugh, though they were not laughable at all? Didn’t I—oh what is man that he is allowed to complain about himself! I will, my dear friend, I promise you, I will improve, I will not chew over the bit of woe that fate presents us with, the way I have always done; I will enjoy the present and let bygones be bygones. Certainly, you’re right, dearest friend, there would be less pain among men if—God knows why they’re constructed so!—they did not so busily employ their bustling imagination to summon up memories of old woes rather than accept an indifferent present.
The Sufferings of Young Werther: A New Translation Page 1
