Verskonkordanz zu Goethes "Faust, Erster Teil" (review)

354 Book Reviews With the wealth of material available for each entry, it becomes possible to indicate certain general tendencies in Goethe's development and use of language, but not to concentrate on the poetic and linguistic uniqueness of individual works. That becomes the explicit task of the Divan dictionary: Gerade diese Eigentümlichkeit zu erfassen," Dill emphasizes, "ist das Anliegen des Wörterbuchs" (VIII). Each lexical entry in the Divan dictionary is supported by enough textual evidence to serve also as a concordance. The individual articles generally begin with the literal meaning of the word as it is derived from the context in which it occurs. If a given word moves from the literal to the figurative, or within either of these orders, this shift is duly noted and in turn supported by appropriate citations. At the moment of registering such semantic shifts, the article inevitably becomes involved in an interpretive gesture. Wherever possible the contextual evidence is at this point supplemented by citations from and references to the major source and lexical studies which have preceded the dictionary and, in addition, the article refers the reader to thematically and/or figuratively related entries. In its microscopic focus on the semantic, figurative and structural function of the individual word, the dictionary succeeds in demonstrating that the unique quality one senses in reading the poems, i.e. that which distinguishes the Divan from the western-oriented poetics of Goethe's other works, results more from the nature of its language and its mode of figuration than from its thematic content. In the introduction Dili focuses on this mode of figuration by distinguishing types of metaphors, and in the appendix she establishes lists of lexical fields based on semantic, figurative or thematic relationships as she sees these emerge from the poems. While one might occasionally argue with her classifications or imagine additional or different ones, these lists nevertheless provide a very helpful overview and underline the thematic and figurative threads by which these poems are bound together. The metaphor analysis of the introduction together with these lexical classifications complements the analytic work of the dictionary and also indicates the type of language-oriented scholarship one might well expect Christa Dill's excellent dictionary to inspire. St. Lawrence University Ingrid Stipa Verskonkordanz zu Goethes "Faust, Erster Teil," bearbeitet von Steven P. Sondrup und David Chisholm. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1986 (Indices zur deutschen Literatur, 18). Despite its restrictive title, this 840-page Faust concordance includes the prose — in any case verse-like — of the scene "Trüber Tag." In an appendix of titles and stage directions it moreover provides a word-index of "Überschriften" and "Bühnenanweisungen," excluding, however, those that like Orchester Tutti and Fideler (or should this be Fiedler?), apparently seemed to the compilers merely to Goethe Yearbook 355 identify "speakers." There is also a listing of word occurrences by frequency. Sensibly, since specialists are less likely than general readers to need a Faust concordance, the text (like the verse or — for prose — page/line numbering) is that of the universally available Hamburg edition (HA), with attention drawn in the compiler's introduction to readings that vary from those of the Weimar and other critical editions. It is no inconvenience to look for "Breter" under Brett or "That" under Tat, and if, because orthographical modernization in HA is not always consistent, "weiter geht" must be sought under weitergeben, where one more naturally finds "weitergehen?," geben entries are helpfully preceded by instructions to see also 19 compound forms that include weitergehen. (In the editio princeps of 1808 neither "weiter" was printed together with its verb. And why vergehen is listed among the otherwise only adverbially modified forms of geben I do not understand, nor why under leben there is a cross-reference to überleben but not to beleben, with its also inseparable prefix). Given the HA text, there is no entry zulieb[e], which in 1808 appeared as "zu lieb gethan" and in HA is "zu Lieb' getan." The compilers helpfully distinguish between adverbs and prepositions (e.g., for auf), and between adverb, conjunction, and preposition in the case of zu, but fail to differentiate between wie as conjunction (e.g...