'They Are Not the Only World'

I have an enthusiasm deficit when it comes to German-language writers. There are exceptions. I love the fiction and journalism of Joseph Roth, and I was a happy reader of W.G. Sebald when he was first being translated into English more than 20 years ago. I won’t try to defend my provinciality, even if I could. Last week, a reader, Tino Markworth, asked me to link to his site, Goethe Global. I browsed his blog and concluded he is a serious amateur scholar, not a flake or fraud. In the spirit of eclecticism, he also devotes sites to Johann Gottfried Herder (whom I’ve never read) and Bob Dylan. In the blog roll on the left you’ll find a link to Goethe Global. Markworth wrote to me the other day: 

“I'm not really surprised that Goethe is not that popular in the English-speaking world because especially his plays and poems lose a lot in translation. Faust is just so much wittier in German. So one way to improve his popularity in the non-German reading world is to focus more on his ‘philosophical’ works like the Maxims and Reflections and his musings on life in his Conversations with Eckermann.”

 

The latter is a book I’ve been meaning to read for decades. I remember in 1984 when the original North Point Press reprinted John Oxenford’s 1850 translation into English. I’ve heard Eckermann likened to Boswell. On Sunday, during a visit to Kaboom Books here in Houston, I found it on the shelf and bought it for $8. I still think of those original North Point Press volumes as some of the most attractively designed books that I own – including seven titles by Guy Davenport.

 

My other purchase has also been long-deferred. For years I’ve relied on library copies of Selected Essays of William Hazlitt, the Nonesuch Press edition edited by Geoffrey Keynes in 1934. It’s a sturdy, no-nonsense volume, one I’m certain will outlast me. In his 1820 essay, “On the Conversation of Authors,” Hazlitt writes:

 

“Books are a world in themselves, it is true; but they are not the only world. The world itself is a volume larger than all the libraries in it. Learning is a sacred deposit from the experience of ages; but it has not put all future experience on the shelf, or debarred the common heard of mankind from the use of their hands, tongues, eyes, ears, or understandings.”