The Flight to Italy: Diary and Selected Letters (Oxford World's Classics) [Paperback]

Johan Wolfgang Goethe (Author), T. J. Reed (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0192838865 | ISBN-13: 978-0192838865 | Publication Date: October 28, 1999

This is the authentic day-to-day record of the first eight weeks of freedom as Germany's greatest poet heads for the Italy he has been yearning to see since childhood and finds himself in a new world of warmth and light. Leaving behind the difficulties of a decade in Weimar, the burden of administration, a difficult love-affair, and the frustration of not having time to work on his literary projects, he discovers himself again as a sensuous being and an artist. Goethe's fresh and spontaneous notes, sometimes dashed down at crowded tables in primitive Italian inns, bring together art and nature, Antiquity and the Renaissance, aesthetics and science, observations of climate, rocks, plants and the Italian people, in an unpremeditated mixture through which the poet's mature vision of the natural and human world can be seen taking shape. Never before translated into English, this diary brings us close to a great European writer at a turning-point of his life.

Editorial Reviews

Review

" Jim Reed brilliantly captures that vulnerable, flesh-and-blood image in this first-ever English translation of Goethe's Italian diary" The Guardian, 11 June 1999

'If you were heading off with your backpack to "do Europe" you would do well to take this along... Your backpack hasn't lived ... until it witnesses Goethe's appetite for life.' Desmond Christy, The Guardian, 14.8.99

'His excitement is contagious; stick it in your backpack.' Times Metro, 4.9.99

About the Author

T.J. Reed is a Fellow of the British Academy and Taylor Professor of German at the University of Oxford.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (October 28, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0192838865
• ISBN-13: 978-0192838865
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #793,950 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Immediate View. . ., September 23, 2001

By 

Martha Ann Kennedy (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: The Flight to Italy: Diary and Selected Letters (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)

Those who love Goethe or love Italy or love traveling might have come across The Italian Journey, Goethe's late-in-life rendering of his experience "fleeing" Weimar and hopeless love to fulfill a lifelong dream of being in Italy. I can't say staying in Italy or visiting Italy or studying Italy because Goethe's quest was so much more profound and fundamental; in Italy Goethe hoped to BE. This diary and these letters, however, are Goethe's immediate impressions, un-editted and not reconsidered. These are his immediate considerations and his emotions expressed in the diary he wrote for Frau von Stein, the woman he loved more or less hopelessly for several years. I love both books, but this one, unlike Italian Journey, is not neatly refined and carved and considered from a mature viewpoint; this is full of the urgency and passion and longing that propelled Goethe across the Brenner and up the slopes of Vesuvius. It's just GREAT.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Breakout and breakthrough, January 27, 2005

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Flight to Italy: Diary and Selected Letters (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)

Goethe's Italian journey came after ten hard years administering and working at Weimar. In these years his literary output contracted. The trip to Italy was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream, a dream inspired in part by his own father's earlier journey and love of Italy. In Italy Goethe found yet another side of his multifaceted self . He opened to the world and the light and to sensuous reality. His connection with Nature is a fundamental theme of his poetry and in Italy he found a Nature which seemed imbued with organic form and Art , and an Art imbued with Nature. In a sense leaving home enabled him to come home to a central side of himself.
Goethe was a writer- scientist- artist whose central theme was his own inner development. This development took a dramatic turn for the good, and these journals of his Italian trip are a central part of ' the great confession' which was his work.