Johann Wolfgang Goethe
The pains of young Werther
Einaudi, 136 pages, 17 euros
Let’s try to re-read a key novel in the history of European literature, the romantic novel (by letter, but for letters with no answer) par excellence, which was the first international best seller. The occasion is a new translation by the great Enrico Ganni, who recently passed away (Luigi Forte remembers him), who inaugurates a series of “great translations” conceived by him.
When the book came out, in 1774, Goethe was 24 years old, and this is the story of the unhappy love for Charlotte, orphan of a mother who cares for many siblings, of a young man as much a lover of nature, beauty and truth as critic of the social hypocrisies he has to face. It is Wilhelm who tells a friend of his pains by letter. Charlotte has a good and likeable boyfriend and finally decides to marry him. Wilhelm kills himself, not without having analyzed himself also with long quotes from Songs of Ossian.
The stories of happy or unhappy love triangles have not been few after this one (remember Jules e Jim, from the point of view of the woman who does not know how to choose?), but here the new sensibility of which Werther is the bearer prevails, and which opens up to the great history of romanticism. Founder and masterpiece, do you still have something to tell us? I think so, at the time of a new narcissism that is anything but revolutionary.
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