Goethes Mutter: Eine Biographie (review)

232 Book Reviews attached to citations of Harold Jantz's work). Glass freely admits in the foreword what every bibliographer knows: the ideal of completeness remains elusive.The one decision that will disappoint many users is the exclusion of translations that result from recordings of music set to Goethe texts (album and liner notes and the like). Thus items such as the "creative translation" by Joseph Auslander of "Zauberlehrling" for Paul Dukas's "The sorcerer's apprentice" on RCA Victor LM 1803 (recorded in Boston, 1954) will not show up here, even though they are an important subset of the reception history.There is still work to do! Inevitably, there are some minor omissions. Coleridge's "Know'st thou the land where the pale citrons grow" (1834) is transmitted in the Poetical Works, ed. E. H. Coleridge (Oxford UP, 1912 and numerous reprintings). Ronald Gray, An Introduction to German Poetry (Cambridge, 1965), quotes four excerpts (13-14; 70-71). Hermann Glaser's The German Mind of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Continuum, 1981), contains five short items, including Minetta Altgelt Goyne's translation of "Urworte. Orphisch" (41 -42). Randall Jarrell's illustrated Faust Part I (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) missed the cut by a year, although the 1976 edition is listed. In any case, Glass's research opens up many avenues for investigation. I was intrigued, for example, by Francis Owen, who seems to have self-published her translations in Westlock, Alberta. Who was she and what motivated her? I also want to know more about the influence of Rudolf Steiner's translations and their distribution by the "Bio-Dynamic Fanning and Gardening Association." And who was Paul Cams? On a different tack, the influence of "forgotten" translators such as Anna Swanwick and Bayard Taylor deserves closer scrutiny. I can even imagine that awareness of what has or has not been done may encourage and guide students to undertake new translations. Every institution where Goethe studies or comparative literature are taken seriously will have to acquire this volume. It would be good if a body such as the English Goethe Society were to sponsor a refereed website where updates could be posted to keep the bibliography growing. Carleton University Arnd Bohtn Dagmar von Gersdorff, Goethes Mutter Eine Biographie. Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 2001.463 pp. What did a woman's life look like in the eighteenth century? And when that woman was Goethe's mother? Where would you look to find out? Women's writing : literature, to the extent that women were allowed to write and publish; letters—fewer than one would think, since Goethe, in a preventative strike, burnt his mother's letters in 1792, with only three or four escaping by accident (letters after 1792 remain largely existent in the Goethe-Schiller-Archiv; Gersdorff designates them "Dokumente von unvergleichlichem literarischem, kulturalem und menschlichem Wert" [327]). Sociological studies from feminist, historical, and archival perspectives with more than a trace of theory and ideology. For women around Goethe, you might turn to the speculative biographies of Sigrid Damm, where you would find in the case of Goethe's sister, Cornelia Goethe Schlosser, an interior life accessed by a remarkable act of empathy, with hints of pathography ; in the case of Goethe's erstwhile partner and eventual wife, Christiane Vulpius Goethe, where for my money Damm is less successful: Here, there is less access to an interior life and less empathy, Goethe's wife reduced to the role of Goethe Yearbook 233 yet another factotum, no more important than his servant-scribe Philip Seidel or an Eckermann, haunted by and in the shadow of Goethe. In a situation like this one, what would happen if you turned to a conventional biography in the old style, that meticulously researched documents and artifacts and refused to stray beyond their surface, to spy on any private life? If for no other reason, to escape Damm's relentless monomaniacal style of feminist biography. And what would happen if in that biography, an attempt was made to give Goethe's mother, Catherine Elisabeth Textor Goethe, a life in her own right? You might find it dry, you might find it unspectacular, you might not...