Morgan Meis at Close Reading:
I was reading some Goethe recently, both in German, since I’m constantly working on my German these days for reasons not entirely clear to anyone, myself included, and also sometimes in an English translation, since it is pretty hard, actually, to read Goethe in German given the somewhat antiquated and very much literary nature of the writing. Actually, come to think of it, I haven’t really been reading Goethe. What I’ve been reading is the account of many long and short conversations between Goethe and a person named Johann Peter Eckermann, who was a youngish literary-minded fellow who sent Goethe some of his writing, writing that was rather ass-kissy in its love of, and reliance on, a Goethian way of thinking, and so Eckermann sent Goethe some of this Goethe-worshiping writing and Goethe, unsurprisingly, lapped it up and invited Eckermann to come and visit him at his fancy house in Weimar. This was in 1823 or thereabouts. Goethe was born in 1749, so this would have made him seventy-four when all this business with Eckermann took place. And then Goethe died in 1832, so there were roughly nine years of Goethe and Eckermann talking and talking and talking. The German edition of the conversations is multiple volumes and the Penguin English translation, which I think is complete, comes to 648 pages in fairly small print.
more here.
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