Open they Goethe
Bloomsbury £25
It’s unmistakably a mission. As he sets out on his entrancing journey, A N Wilson willingly concedes that ‘Goethe is, surely, among all the truly great writers of this world, the least read in the English-speaking world.’ What are we all missing, in particular, by not reading his acknowledged masterpiece, Faust? Wilson declares that ‘he is going to attempt the impossible – to read Faust and persuade you to do so too’. It’s not as if the English are instinctively hostile to foreign literature. We lap up War and Peace; we descend eagerly into Dante’s Inferno. Wilson has written brilliantly about both Tolstoy and Dante, learning Russian and Italian for the purpose, just as he has learnt German to master Goethe. I was apprehensive when he announced that he would be offering his own translations of the wonderful shorter lyrics, which are notoriously hard to convey in English. I need...
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