![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre appeared in 1795–96, two decades after the publication of Bertuch’s translation of Cervantes’ Don Quijote and three years before Tieck’s seminal translation of the same. Both novels famously feature errant protagonists with complex lives and problematic love interests. This comparative paper offers a detailed exploration of the potential links. The initial focus is contextual, with a discussion of Goethe’s reception of Cervantes’s work and the critical responses of Goetheforschung to this meeting of great minds. The paper then explores parallels between the texts, building on the work of Barry Ife on Quijote in relation to the use of voice (especially song) and dissembling (ventriloquy) in the Lehrjahre.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Professor Jeremy Adler who drew my attention to Sir Barry Ife’s work on the Quijote as performance, particularly in relation to song and music, and proposed an approach to the Lehrjahre on similar lines, to explore Goethe’s second major prose work as a ‘singing novel’, and to Professor Ife himself for his time in discussing the paper with me. Thanks also go to Professor Helen Abbott for her expertise on song.
Notes
1 Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. by Ernst Behler and others, 35 vols (Paderborn: Schönigh, 1958–), I, ii: Charakteristiken und Kritiken I (1796–1801), ed. by Hans Eichner (1967), p. 236
2 Friedrich Schelling, Werke: Auswahl in drei Bänden, ed. by Otto Weiß, 3 vols (Leipzig: Eckart, 1907).
3 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, Edición del IV Centenario (Madrid: Real Academia Española/Asociación de Academias de la lengua Española, 2004), p. 260. Translation: ‘As they rested in the shade, they heard a voice that, unaccompanied by any other instrument, was sweet and melodious; and they were astonished, this not seeming to be a place to come across someone singing so well — because although it’s often said that shepherds with fine singing voices are to be found in the woods and fields, this is more exaggeration than sober truth. And they were even more amazed when they realized that what they could hear being sung were verses not of rustic herdsmen but of intelligent courtiers’; Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. by John Rutherford (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), p. 230.
4 Barry Ife, ‘From Stage to Page: Don Quijote as Performance’, in The Art of Cervantes in Don Quijote: Critical Essays, ed. by Stephen Boyd, Trudi Darby and Terence O’Reilly, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures, 27 (Oxford: Legenda, 2019), pp. 93–118 (p. 93).
5 Ife, p. 95.
6 Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. by Christoph Michel and Hans Grüters, DKV im Taschenbuch, 50 (Berlin: DKV, 2011), p. 165.
7 Angela Leighton, Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (Cambridge, MS: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), p. 2.
8 Leighton, p. 5.
9 See Goethes Bibliothek: Katalog, ed. by Hans Ruppert (Weimar: Arion-Verlag, 1958).
10 See Goethe als Benutzer der Weimarer Bibliothek: Ein Verzeichnis der von ihm entliehenen Werke, ed. by Elise von Keudell and Werner Deitzen (Weimar: Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1931).
11 A. W. Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Briefe, ed. by E. Lohner, 7 vols (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1962–74), vi: Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literature — Zweiter Teil (1967), p. 267.
12 Joseph Bickermann, Don Quijote und Faust: Die Helden und die Werke (Berlin: Collignon, 1929), p. 193.
13 Adam Müller, Vorlesungen über deutsche Wissenschaft und Litteratur (Dresden: Arnold, 1806), p. 51.
14 Rahel von Varnhagen, Ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde, 3 vols (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1834), iii, 59
15 J.-J. A Bertrand, Cervantes et le Romantisme Allemand (Paris: Alcan, 1914), pp. 77–79; Arturo Farinelli, Guillaume de Humboldt et l’Espagne: Avec une esquisse sur Goethe et l’Espagne (Turin: Bocca, 1924), pp. 317–62.
16 Werner Brüggemann, Cervantes und die Figur des Don Quijote in Kunstanschauung und Dichtung der deutschen Romantik, Spanische Forschungen der Görresgesellschaft, 2/7 (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1958), pp. 56–57.
17 Michael Nerlich, ‘Don Quichotte ou le combat autor d’un mythe’, in Le Regard d’Orphée : Les Mythes littéraires de l’Occident, ed. by Bernadette Bricout (Paris: Seuil, 2001), pp. 111–35 (p. 122)
18 Jeremy Adler, Goethe: Die Erfindung der Moderne. Eine Biographie (Munich: Beck, 2022), p. 200.
19 Farinelli, p. 355.
20 Alexander Gelley, Narrative Crossings: Theory and Pragmatics of Prose Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 73.
21 Ife, p. 95.
22 Liisa Steinby, ‘Temporality, Subjectivity and the Representation of Characters in the Eighteenth-Century Novel from Defoe’s Moll Flanders to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre’, in Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. by L. Steinby and Aino Mäkikalli (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), pp. 135–60 (p. 136).
23 Rosa Mucignat, ‘Theatrical Revolutions and Domestic Reforms: Space and Ideology in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Austen’s Mansfield Park’, Comparative Critical Studies, 7 (2010), 21–40 (p. 34).
24 Ife, p. 97.
25 Terence Cave, Mignon’s Afterlives: Crossing Cultures from Goethe to the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 17
26 Cave, p. 17.
27 Ife, p. 101.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Carol Tully
Carol Tully is Professor of German at Bangor University. Her research centres on the intellectual networks and cultural mediators of the nineteenth century. She recently led on the AHRC-funded project ‘European Travellers to Wales 1750-2010’ and co-authored with Kathryn N. Jones and Heather Williams the study Hidden Texts, Hidden Nation: (Re)Discoveries of Wales in French and German Travel Writing (1790-2018) (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020).