Verse translation by David Luke | introduction by Hans Rudolf Vaget

This bilingual edition of two of Goethe’s greatest and most approachable poetic works makes them available for the first time to an English-reading public in a full and faithful translation.

Written in 1789 just after his return from Italy, where he had lived in Rome, and at the outset of his relation with Christiane, his future wife, the Roman elegies mark a crucial turning-point in Goethe’s achievement, away from youthful striving Romanticism and towards a more mature, fulfilled – and therefore more sensuous – Classicism. Focusing on an affair with a Roman mistress, which takes place in eighteenth-century Rome but which is inseparable in the poet’s mind from his immersion in Classical Antiquity, the Roman elegies constitute, and share, the happiness and fulfilment of physical love.

The diary, written in 1810 when its author was at the height of his mature powers, remained unpublished during Goethe’s lifetime because of its eroticism, and is still omitted from most editions of his works. It is now recognized as not only the boldest of his erotic masterpieces, but as a narrative poem of incomparable good humour and beauty.

The introduction provides the background to these two poems in Goethe’s life and work, and draws attention to some of the profound and hitherto little-known connections between them.

Published by Libris in 1988