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278 Book Reviews modern heroine and I am not convinced that this is the same as resisting the urge to be herself. Rather, it seems to me that she has remained herself, an unambitious, non-enterprising rich woman of the later eighteenth century, in spite of a book that wants to portray her as a martyr. University of California, Irvine Gail K Hart Blank, Hugo, Goethe und Manzoni: Weimar und Mailand. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1988 (Studia Románica 70). Goethe und Manzoni: Deutsch-italienische Beziehungen um 1800, ed. Werner Ross. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1989 (Reihe der Villa Vigoni). The bare facts of Goethe's warm and oddly disembodied (or alienated) relationship with Manzoni are by now well enough known. Duke Carl August had visited Milan in 1817. At that time he came to know several local men of taste and dilettanti, who made a point of staying in touch with him in later years. The numismatist Gaetano Cattaneo was particularly assiduous in recommending to the duke firet, and to Goethe soon after, the budding genius of the young Alessandro Manzoni. Goethe received each major piece of Manzoni's thin production as soon as it was published: the Inni Sacri (Sacred Hymns) in 1818, the tragedy// Conte di Carmagnola in 1819, then in 1822 the great ode on the death of Napoleon (// Cinque Maggio) and the tragedy Adelcbi; finally in 1827 Goethe read Manzoni's masterpiece IPromessi Sposi. Each time Goethe responded with approval and even with enthusiasm. He gave a public judgment on Manzoni first in the essay "Classiker und Romantiker in Italien, sich heftig bekämpfend" that was published in Ueber Kunst und Altertum (11,2) in 1820, an article that Erwin Koppen in his contribution to the Werner Ross volume shows to have been largely a processing of information provided by Cattaneo (18-21). Thereafter Goethe responded either by pubfic pronouncement or in private (or both). He translated the Cinque Maggio ode almost immediately (it was published in Kunst und Altertum IV,2, in eariy 1823), he wrote on both tragedies and arranged an edition of Manzoni's writings in which his own commentaries appeared as an introduction. Finally, when he received the novel, he confided to Eckermann on July 18, 1827 that he did not believe higher achievements were possible in that particular genre. (The superlatives are stunning: "alles überflügelt was wir in dieser Art kennen," along with: "Ich dächte, höher könnte man es nicht treiben," or "daß ihm schwerlich etwas gleichkommen kann"). Goethe urged (in the event, unsuccessfully) Streckfuß, translator of Dante, Tasso, and Ariosto, as well as of some earlier works by Manzoni, to undertake the translation of IPromessi Sposi. Manzoni, by temperament "shy and inhibited" as Blank rightly describes him, responded seldom, but in accents of warm gratitude and (almost obsequious) admiration. The two never met. This sequence of events was clarified through patient research firet by Piero Fossi (1937) and Josefine Rumpf-Fleck (1942), but then more thoroughly and systematically by Mario Puppo (1973), Horst Rüdiger (1973), and Goethe Yearbook 279 Mazzino Montinari (1971), whose work was completed and refined by HansGeorg Griining (1988) and Ernesto Guidorizzi (1988) in chapters or sections of their recent books. While the two books under review do bring some additional factual information, they are essentially engaged in expanding the contexts of the relationship and, much more timidly and vaguely, in sketching out some of its meanings. Hugo Blank's book contains three separate sections. The first (10-125) emphasizes the importance of seeing the Goethe-Manzoni relationship as part of a wider Weimar-Milan flow of cultural contacts, art deals, intellectual correspondence, and the like. The role of Heinrich Mylius — a patrician international businessman located in Milan even though the headquarters of his firm were in Frankfurt — in this web of relations is pointed out with, I believe, some slight exaggeration. The third part of the volume (186-277) is a long analysis of the ode on Napoleon's death. It presents the genesis of this poem, compares Goethe's translation with the original and refers in some detail to other versions in German and to translations in other languages...

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