A new translation of a Goethe classic

By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Translated by Stanley Corngold

W.W. Norton. 151 pp. $23.95

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Reviewed by Harold Brubaker

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel of Werther, an emotionally turbulent, socially discontented, and self-absorbed young man, unleashed a media firestorm when it was published 237 years ago. It ranks among the rare works of 18th-century German literature that still have currency in the English-speaking world.

The novel, written in four weeks when Goethe was 24 and based partly on his own story of frustrated love for a woman engaged to another man, inspired a Werther fever, including fashion, numerous copycat suicides, and 100 literary knock-offs between 1775 and 1800 in German-speaking countries. The book was translated into French in 1776 and English in 1779.

The pull of the novel, a stream of Werther's letters in direct and spirited language that was epoch-making for German literature, has not waned. A 2010 German film that blends events from the lives of young Goethe and the novel has been shown at U.S. film festivals, including Philadelphia's.

At least eight English translations of the novel have been published since 1949, the latest appearing this month by Stanley Corngold, a retired Princeton University professor of German and comparative literature.

Corngold, best known for his Franz Kafka scholarship and translations, called his version the Sufferings of Young Werther, instead of the more common Sorrows of Young Werther. Corngold is not the first to choose the more physical of two primary English meanings of the German. Harry Steinhauer, whom Corngold acknowledges, along with other predecessors, in his introduction, did the same in 1970.

The choice is good because sufferings fits better with the themes of emotional and physical sickness and health Werther debates with other characters, and blunts the sentimentality that has caused many readers to see Werther as a simple love story.

To be sure, Werther falls hard for Lotte, a young woman he meets at a country dance, even though he knows she is engaged. After Lotte agrees to see him again anyway, Werther writes: "and since then, sun, moon, and stars can quietly go about their business, I don't know whether it's day or night, the whole world around me vanishes."

Had Goethe left it at that, making Werther a straightforward love story, he likely would have better satisfied one of his most famous fans, Napoleon Bonaparte, who claimed to have read the book seven times and to have carried it with him on his Egyptian campaign in 1798.

When the paths of the two men crossed in 1808, Napoleon wanted to meet Goethe - who had matured into a statesman, scientist, and European literary giant since his stormy youth - but not just to praise the author.

Rather, Napoleon, according to a contemporary account, complained that Goethe had muddied the story by depicting Werther's prideful clash with nobles after he attempted to leave the torment of his feelings for Lotte behind and start a career working in a nobleman's court.

There, Werther seems attracted to a young noblewoman, whose "social class is a burden to her, one that gratifies none of her heart's desires," though he also talks to her about Lotte. But Werther soon flees the court after the count asks him to leave a gathering of nobles because they were disturbed by the presence of Werther, a member of the middle class.

Those experiences at court showed that Werther's paths in life were not cut off by his loss of Lotte, but by his pride and a class system with limitations he could not tolerate. Like horses that "instinctively bite open a vein in order to breath freely," Werther wrote that he would "like to open a vein that would grant me eternal freedom."

Corngold described his version of Werther in his introduction as "an effortful attempt to capture the always astonishing liveliness of Goethe's language." The translation does well by that measure, conveying the speed and passion Goethe gave to Werther, as in this sentence:

"All the gifts, all the favors the world can bestow cannot replace an instant of pleasure in oneself that our tyrant's envious discontent has turned to bile." Corngold stays closer to the German and was brilliant in his choice of the world bile, which is much better than translations that have the tyrant destroying or spoiling that pleasure.

Another of Corngold's goals, mentioned in his introduction, was "never knowingly choosing what was not current in English ca. 1787," when Goethe published a revised edition of the novel. The impact of that effort is harder to judge, based on a comparison of several passages by Corngold and three predecessors.

Still, this polished new version of Werther has a great chance to attract new readers to a work that has fascinated not just Napoleon but a long line of literary greats, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Kafka, and Thomas Mann.