Customer Reviews

Italian Journey: 1786-1788 (Penguin Classics)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In preparation for a trip to Italy, I began reading the accounts of famous travellers to that land: D.H. Lawrence, Charles Dickens, Tobias Smollett, and now Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I had no great expectations but was knocked for a loop from page one.

Never before had I encountered a questing mind quite like Goethe's. Almost from the moment to left Carlsbad in September 1786, he was noticing the geological structures underlying the land and the flora and fauna above it. He sits down and talks with ordinary people without an attitude -- and this after he had turned the heads of half of Europe with his SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER. Here he was journeying incognito, apparently knowing the language well enough to communicate with peasants, prelates, and nobility.

One who abhors marking books I intend to keep, I found myself underlining frequently. "In this place," he writes from Rome, "whoever looks seriously about him and has eyes to see is bound to become a stronger character." In fact, Goethe spent over a year in Rome learning art, music, science, and even sufferings the pangs of love with a young woman from Milan.

Bracketing his stay in Rome is a longish journey to Naples and Sicily, where he becomes acquainted with Sir Warren Hamilton and his consort Emma, the fascinating Princess Ravaschieri di Satriano, and other German travelers. One of them, Wilhelm Tischbein, painted a wonderful portrait of Goethe the traveller shown on the cover of the Penguin edition.

The translation of W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer is truly wonderful. My only negative comments are toward the Penguin editors who, out of some pennywise foolishness, have omitted translating the frequent Latin, Greek, and French quotes. I am particularly upset about the lack of a translation of the final quote from Ovid's "Tristia." In every other respect, this book is a marvel and does not at all read like a work written some 215 years ago. It is every bit as fresh and relevant as today's headlines, only ever so much more articulate!

Many people are deterred from attempting to read something...anything...by Goethe because of his extremely penetrating intelligence and dense prose. But his "Travels in Italy" are by far easier to digest than anything else by him. The journal is a straightforward diary of his sojourn to Italy as a young man sometime in the 1770's. The book has a modern ring to it, and indeed Goethe seems to foreshadow the coming of many of the things we consider "modern" today: intense self examination, scientific methodology, and anthropology. But that's not what makes this a great book. Long after you finish it you will be contemplating the wealth of pithy, insightful comments he makes about Italians in particular and humans in general. You will revisit portions of this book many times, and you will mark passages in it so you can pull it down and quote it to your friends. A fabulous feast for the intellect and a balm for the spirit.

This has long been my favorite work by Goethe. It is very readable, which most people don't expect from Goethe, connecting him to his poetry and to Faust, etc. But the book reveals so much about him (the reader gets a sense that the man knows he will be evaluated by people hundreds of years hence) and it also leaves so much to the imagination. I can't recommend this book more highly. It contains the musings of a brilliant human being and is a singular travelogue of Italy.

This classic reveals much about Goethe, as well as about Italy. In observing the waves at the gulf of Naples he shows the extreme empiricism of his incursions into science, with beautiful words, of course. The portraits of Naples and Catania are still up to date in their essentials. I wish I had read this book before my long sojourn in that wonderful country.

This was billed as a good introduction to Goethe. I don't know, since this is the first Goethe I've read--but I'm delighted. It starts as a sojourn south, with detailed notations of rocks, geologic information and topography. Don't let that deter you! His description of eating just bread and red wine on his sea voyage to Sicily (because of his rolling seasickness) had me running for a bottle Italian Barbera! As my late great aunt would have said: "A nice, nice book."

Goethe comes alive as a very real person, not just the famous German author, in this travel memoir detailing the two years he spent in Italy in the 1780's. A wonderful description of travel before airplanes and cameras. Somewhat tedious descriptions of geology and of his works-in-progress are frequent, but never too long.

It might be helpful to read (or re-read) the introduction after having read part of the book (say, into the first Roman visit).

This is a great intro to Goethe, who here seems human, approachable, and caught up in an encounter with Italy that changed pretty much his whole worldview. Written with congenial grace, wit, and observant appreciation.

It is curious that, as translators W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer point out in the Introduction, outside Germany, Goethe remains highly respected yet never actually read by most literary people. Studying literature during and before my undergraduate years, I was introduced to Dante in translation, to Moliere and Racine in the original French and, of course, to Shakespeare. But Goethe was barely mentioned, certainly not studied. Perhaps it is down to the difficulty of the German language. I simply don't know. I did read The Sorrows of Young Werther on my own in my youth, but remember being unimpressed. The Germans, on the other hand, have had a love affair with Shakespeare that, at times, has almost eclipsed the devotion to him in his own country. In short, I felt obliged to read this travelogue in an attempt to become better acquainted with a writer whom Germans hold in such high esteem.

And what a treat it is! Whatever Goethe's motives in making a sojourn in Italy, much debated in the Introduction, it seems certainly well worth it for him as well as for the reader. Well-nigh every chapter is drenched with the Italian sunshine and carpe diem attitudes he finds in Italy (particularly Naples) which he seldom fails to contrast with what he refers to as the dark and gloomy northern climes. As he states, almost shouts, one wants to say, in a letter written from San Luca, "I shall leave everything as it stands because first impressions, even if they are not always correct, are valuable and precious to us. Oh, if only I could send my distant friends a breath of the more carefree existence here!"

There are some few and far between rather dull moments, as will occur in any travelogue recorded in this fashion, but, for the most part the sunlit waves and piazzas of 18th Century Italy are wafted to the reader through this - as far as I can discern - very able translation.

It is beyond the scope of this review to cover everything Goethe experiences in Italy and, more particularly, Rome, where he ends up spending most of his time studying painting, architecture, anatomy and, above all, becoming immersed in Italianate culture whilst continuing to write, enlivened by the liberation he feels. Goethe himself does a better job of summing it all up than I can:

"While living this year among strangers, I have observed that all really intelligent people recognize, some in a refined, some in a gross way, that the moment is everything and that the sole privilege of a reasonable being is to behave in such a manner, in so far as the choice lies within him, that his life contains the greatest possible sum of reasonable and happy moments."

What a lovely way of reflecting upon what a climate and people have taught one!

This journal of Goethe's Italian travels at 38 years old is an intriguing record of late 18th century Italy. It also describes what would it have been like to be a wealthy European tourist at that time. With an introduction by the translators W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer, this readable book showcases Goethe's interest in painting, sculpture, landscape, geology, botany and the Italian people. His description of the Roman Carnival is fascinating as are his various anecdotes including a nearly disastrous shipwreck on his return to Naples, the religious career of Filippo Neri and his romantic acquaintance with a Neapolitan princess. As mentioned by a previous reviewer, there are various untranslated verses/phrases (and historical minutiae) that could have been handled by footnotes instead of sending you to Google. Another slightly irritating aspect of the journal is his repeated apologies to his German friends about being away for so long in Italy : ) But these are small impediments to what is a very absorbing account of a great poet discovering Italy.

Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Title: Italienische Reise
[Title:] [Italian Journey]
Time: 1786-88
Destination:
Italy
Length: about 2 years
Type: overland
Rating: 4/10
The boring genius

First things first: By the time JWG embarks on his big journey to Italy, he is already a veritable superstar: Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther) of 1774 had been a real zinger, and JGW had consequently been made JW von G in 1782.

The story of this journey: JWG breaks out of the German literary circles to look for inspiration in the sunnier climes of Italy. This is a pretty popular thing to do at the time, even though Italian roads were surprisingly dangerous back then. Anyway, JWG willingly takes on this journey, hoping to broaden his knowledge of natural sciences and art history in the process. But it is about more than that: he is in fact looking for a certain cultivation of character.

I don't know if he came back a better man. But I think from what I've read, he came back with a pretty boring book. (But then I didn't like Die Leiden des jungen Werther or Wilhelm Meister that much either.)

Why is this book so lame?

I think the problem lies in the fact that JWG secretly knows about his own genius. And to me, it was just tiring to hear the echo of it in every one of his words. I didn't enjoy reading his endless ramblings about botany or geology. His thoughts on art were wordy but okay. But when he was like "I'm going to turn into a painter now!" I found myself yawning and counting the pages.

The worst thing about this book though: JWG is so obsessed with the cultivation of his own character, that he seems to grow completely indifferent to other human beings (as long as they're not hot chicks). This book is mostly about him. And his genius.

Yawn.

The only reason this one is getting a 4/10 is because JWG is a true master of the aphorism: "die Natur ist doch das einzige Buch, das auf allen Blättern großen Gehalt bietet." ("Nature is, after all, the only book that offers important content on every page.")

Word.

4/10