"It is a literary bridge over dividing rivers, a spiritual highway over dividing mountains"

Goethe and World Literature ❤️

#onhisbirthdaytoday 

Well, these lovely excerpts that follow, are from a book titled, Goethe and World Literature.

The book has some real spell-binding phrases, lines and paragraphs – lines that drink deep of a divine literary sensibility – lines that keep you truly madly glued and wooed!

The first chapter foregrounds the aura behind the term ‘World Literature’ in such picturesque ways – unique ways in which Goethe had conceptualised and envisaged it.

So here goes –

The term “world literature”, coined by Goethe, immediately brings to the mind a feeling of liberation, of such gain in space and scope as one feels on entering a larger and more airy room.

However vague the expression is, it at least suggests the removal of intellectual barriers between peoples; and it is one of the objects of this book that this feeling should gradually develop into clear understanding, and thereby exert a doubly liberating influence.

World literature is, then, according to Goethe, the literature which serves as a link between national literatures and thus between the nations themselves, for the exchange of ideal values.

Such literature includes all writings by means of which the peoples learn to understand and make allowances for each other, and which bring them more closely together.

It is a literary bridge over dividing rivers, a spiritual highway over dividing mountains.

It is an intellectual barter, a traffic in ideas between peoples, a literary market to which the nations bring their intellectual treasures for exchange.

World literature is thus the intellectual sphere in which, through the voices of their writers, the peoples speak no longer to and of themselves but to each other.

It is an international conversation, an intellectual interest in each other, a mutual helping and supplementing of each other in the things of the mind.

But what ways and means are at the disposal of a literature which is to open up communications between the peoples?

The most important means, and therefore the most essential element in a universal world literature, is the literature of translation, which is the first step in intellectual barter between peoples.

As Goethe says, every translator should be regarded as an active agent in this universal, intellectual commerce.

For, whatever one may say of the inadequacy of translation, it remains one of the most valuable activities in the general traffic of nations.

The Koran says: God has given to every people a prophet in their own language. Every translator is then a prophet among his own people.

A tune can be transposed into any key and yet remain identical. But no literary work can be translated, however brilliantly, without undergoing some change.

What awe-inspiring lines, ain’t they? 😊

To be contd…