Happy birthday, Goethe

[selenak]

Since today is Goethe's birthday, here's a good podcast for English speaking folk on the birthday boy, co-starring Tim Blanning and Sarah Colvin:

Watch on YouTube

Good Goethe translations into English are still hard to come by, but here's one of Der Zauberlehrling - "The Sorceror's Apprenctice" - perhaps Disney having had a go at it helped?

Watch on YouTube

And here's an excerpt from the poetry cycle "The West-Eastern Divan", which Barenboim & Said took the name of their orchestra from:

Watch on YouTube

Comments

[kore]

Aww, very nice! (love that icon)

[cahn]

:D I finaly got a chance to listen to these (well, not the podcast, it's long enough I will have to wait on that one) and these are so great, thank you! I especially liked that the Sorcerer's Apprentice had the text on the youtube page so I could see the text as well as read it, which I feel like -- isn't always helpful, necessarily, but I feel like a lot of poetry benefits from both being available. (If the translation is good! This really seemed like the translator had taken a great deal of care with it.)

(! I didn't actually realize Sorcerer's Apprentice was Goethe! Is it supposed to be as allegorical as it sounds? I... did not get that from Disney, though I was pretty young when I watched the Disney version.)

[selenak]

What I most appreciated about the "Sorceror's Apprentice" translation was it the translator tries to recreate some of the "sound effects", so to speak - the original incantation in German triggers water-wave-associations, for example.

Allegorical: well. On the one hand, the story of the poem is from Lucian and first was written in the second century AD - Goethe knew it via a translation of Wieland. Also, the poem was written in the "Ballad Year", 1797, when Goethe and Schiller were in playful ballad writing contest and kept sending each other ballads (which would all appear in Schiller's magazine "Die Horen" the subsequent year), so it might not have been ore than fun. Otoh: 1797 is notably post French Revolution and specifically the "Terror" within the Revolution. Goethe distinctly not a fan of the later. (The originally far more pro Revolution minded Schiller also at this point was thoroughly disillusioned. He'd been made an honorary citizen of France due to his youthful plays, but by the time his citizen document arrived - which was late, due to the adress being to "Monsieur Giller, poet", nothing else -, most of the signatories had been beheaded themselves. ) So he might have meant it as an allegory about awakening forces you can't control re: the Revolution.

(Whereas I'm pretty sure he didn't mean it in a Frankenstein manner about science. Among many other things, Goethe was a scientist himself and even discovered a bone ithe human skeleton, this one. He was rather keen on discoveries.)

And lastly: in 1797, Goethe was the father of a nine years old lively boy. I think that might have had something to do with the poem, too. :) (Note that Disney presenting the returning Sorceror as angry and stern isn't in the poem itself. That's a Mouse addition.)

[selenak]

:) Good to hear.

[cahn]

Yessss I definitely got that sense from the translation, that it was trying to recreate how the original felt, and I really respect that.

Oh interesting, thank you as always for the history! And, heh, I can see being the father of a nine-year-old miiiiight have a lot to do with it :D