Italian Journey [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Everybody knows that the thrones of European Literature are occupied by the triumvirate referred to in Finnegans Wake as Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper, but to most Enghsh-speaking readers the second is merely a name. German is a more difficult language to learn to read than Italian, and whereas Shakespeare, apparently, translates very well into German, Goethe is peculiarly resistant to translation into EngHsh; Hölderlin and Rilke, for example, come through much better. From a translation of Faust, any reader can see that Goethe must have been extraordinarily intelligent, but he will probably get the impression that he was too intellectual, too lacking in passion, because no translation can give a proper idea of Goethe's amazing command of every style of poetry, from the coarse to the witty to the lyrical to the sublime. The reader, on the other hand, who does know some German and is beginning to take an interest in Goethe comes up against a cultural barrier, the humourless idolization of Goethe by German professors and critics who treat every word he ever uttered as Holy Writ. Even if it were in our cultural tradition to revere our great writers in this way, it would be much more difficult for us to idolize Shakespeare the man because we know nothing about him, whereas Goethe was essentially an autobiographical writer, whose life is the most documented of anyone who ever lived; compared with Goethe, even Dr Johnson is a shadowy figure. For those whose ignorance of German cuts them off from Goethe's poetry and who have an instinctive prejudice against professional sages, his Italian Journey may well be the best book of his to start on. To begin with, there are hundreds and thousands of Englishmen and Americans who have made an Italian journey of their own and, to many of them, their encounter with Italy, its landscape, its people, its art, has been as important an experience as it was to Goethe, so that the subject-matter of the book will interest them, irrespective of its author, and they will