“God” is there, but immanent in the world rather than transcendent, or, to put it in the terms he uses in “Prooemion,” a God who acts from inside Nature rather than from outside.

“One and All” praises the surrender of the separate, suffering self to be dissolved into infinity in a way reminiscent of Buddhism, yet “Legacy” praises the persistence of identity through time ( “No being can melt into nothingness”). “Orphic Words” gives voice to several views of the human condition, including contradictory-sounding ones like astrological predestination ( “Our freedom is deceptive”), social constructionism ( “Your self is formed by your society”), and hope ( “It gives us wings”).

Finally comes peace as reconciliation: “All strife and struggle have become / Eternal peace in God the Lord.” The mystical ending of Faust II reveals a vision of how “Almighty Love” creates and sustains all things. Goethe’s “divine humanism,” at times reminiscent of that of William Blake, is expressed in his reflection on the astronomer Kepler’s sense of “the most exact fusion between the divine in himself and the divine in the universe.” This could well describe Goethe’s own sense of the highest human potential.

Nature and Art

Some of Goethe’s early lyrics are pure love-songs to Nature, seemingly effortless effusions of joy. But this is balanced by a more sober appreciation of her destructive as well as her benign aspects. Stillness may be the prelude to a storm. Voyages may be “fortunate” (a favourite word of Goethe’s), or may end up on the rocks if the sailors are careless or over-confident.

Nature and art are often seen as opposites, but as Goethe puts it in his sonnet “Nature and Art,” they often “meet unexpectedly.” Nature inspires and re-inspires the artist; the second mode here is important for Goethe, who knows that the initial impetus may need one or many renewals. Similarly, the artist’s task is to renew creation, “to re-create created forms.” Goethe celebrates Imagination as “My Goddess,” who bridges the gaps between God, Nature and humanity, and whom he evokes as Jove’s favourite daughter and our “faithful spouse.”

Goethe believed both that Nature is creative and that creativity is natural. But his poems about the vicissitudes of the artistic life show that it is not always easy: he is hard on dilettantism. Only with discipline and perseverance is the artist rewarded with completion. An artist’s night-time projects may prove difficult to realize the next day. Goethe sees his poetic gift as a “golden lyre,” a loyal friend who can bring relief to suffering.

Wit and Wisdom

From his Italian sojourn onwards, Goethe frequently wrote epigrams. Some are autobiographical, as is the one describing the traits he has inherited from his parents and great-grandparents, or another in which he pays tribute to “his” Duke, whose patronage has proved more beneficial (and profitable) than that of the European reading public.

Politically, Goethe usually comes across as a skeptic. He had a low opinion of “the crowd,” particularly its role in the French Revolution, but he also castigated the aristocracy for deceiving the people, and “the powerful” for circulating debased coinage. Demagogues and charismatic leaders come in for scorn, as do professors of theory. Among the qualities advocated by Goethe are originality, spontaneity and generosity, but they are predictably matched by authority, decorum, and respect for tradition. Some epigrams offer wisdom, in the form of pithy advice about social conduct, personal relationships, politics or simply how to be happy. Others offer wit, in the form of sardonic observations about how people often act like fools.

Formally, the epigrams are varied, ranging from the long-lined unrhymed classical “elegiac distich,” to shorter-lined couplets or quatrains (both rhymed and unrhymed), as well as poems running to eight or more lines. Many of them were collected into sequences such as the Venetian Epigrams of 1790, or the Zahme Xenien ( “tame xenias,” from the Greek xenia, gifts from the host) assembled towards the end of Goethe’s life. Other poems which Goethe classed as epigrams take up themes which make them more suited to the other divisions of this selection.

PRINCIPLES OF SELECTION AND TRANSLATION

This selection of Goethe’s poems consists of only a fraction of his prolific output in verse. Many, but not all, of his best-known shorter poems are included, and the choice is limited to those of which I felt I could produce an acceptable version. Much is omitted: many of the short epigrams and occasional verse, and also most of the long poems: verse epics like “Hermann and Dorothea,” narratives like “The Diary” and “The Bride of Corinth,” and scientific poems like “The Metamorphosis of Plants.” Goethe’s book-length collection of Roman Elegies is not represented. Other collections or cycles like the West-Eastern Divan, the Sonette ( “Sonnet Cycle”), and the “Chinese-German Hours and Seasons” are represented by a few poems. Three excerpts are taken from the very last scenes of Faust II, because they seemed to me to have a kind of mystical finality without which my selection would be incomplete.

On translation, Goethe has the following prose maxim: “Translators are to be regarded as busy matchmakers who exalt the great loveliness of a half-veiled beauty: they kindle an irresistible longing for the original.” Granted. But for poetry readers without or with minimal German, verse translation can open a way to an appreciation of Goethe’s wide-ranging poetic gifts, verse forms, and views of life. Of course there remains the untranslatable, and Goethe has a maxim about this as well: “When one is translating, one has to go right up to the untranslatable; but it is only at this point that one actually discovers the foreign nation and the foreign language.” The complement of this idea is found in a comment made by Ezra Pound to the poet and translator W.S. Merwin: “Translating will teach you your own language.” That moment of encounter, where a meaning hovers between two languages (and often between two eras) is what draws poetry translators back to their fascinating but frustrating task.

In these versions of Goethe, I have tried to keep the metre and lineation of the original, and also the rhyme, as far as is compatible with making sense in some approximation to the idiom of contemporary English poetry. Of course, the rhyme is the hardest part, and here I have been guided by Goethe’s own priorities:

I like full rhyme to end each line,

But expressing my thoughts in full,

That is the noblest gift of all—

It’s worth any number of rhymes.

In other words, making sense is the first consideration, rhyming is the second. In keeping with current practice in English, I have allowed off-rhymes and eye-rhymes to count, and have occasionally modified the original rhyme scheme. A few times I have translated a rhymed poem without any rhymes, and occasionally pruned repeated exclamations which might jar the modern reader.

Although I have followed different principles, I have, naturally enough, learned from previous translators, including David Luke, Goethe: Selected Verse (Penguin, 1964), Stanley Appelbaum, 103 Great Poems, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Dover, 1999), and John Whaley, Goethe: Selected Poems (J.M. Dent, 1998).

The various prose maxims quoted in this introduction are from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Maxims and Reflections, tr. Elisabeth Stopp, ed. Peter Hutchinson (Penguin, 1998).