The Flight to Italy: Diary and Selected Letters (Oxford World's Classics) - Softcover

Goethe, Johan Wolfgang

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192838865 ISBN 13: 9780192838865

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1999

Synopsis

This is the authentic day-to-day record of the first eight weeks of freedom as Germany's greatest poet heads for the Italy he has been yearning to see since childhood and finds himself in a new world of warmth and light. Leaving behind the difficulties of a decade in Weimar, the burden of administration, a difficult love-affair, and the frustration of not having time to work on his literary projects, he discovers himself again as a sensuous being and an artist. Goethe's fresh and spontaneous notes, sometimes dashed down at crowded tables in primitive Italian inns, bring together art and nature, Antiquity and the Renaissance, aesthetics and science, observations of climate, rocks, plants and the Italian people, in an unpremeditated mixture through which the poet's mature vision of the natural and human world can be seen taking shape. Never before translated into English, this diary brings us close to a great European writer at a turning-point of his life.

About this title

About the Author:

T.J. Reed is a Fellow of the British Academy and Taylor Professor of German at the University of Oxford.

Review:

" Jim Reed brilliantly captures that vulnerable, flesh-and-blood image in this first-ever English translation of Goethe's Italian diary" The Guardian, 11 June 1999

'If you were heading off with your backpack to "do Europe" you would do well to take this along... Your backpack hasn't lived ... until it witnesses Goethe's appetite for life.' Desmond Christy, The Guardian, 14.8.99

'His excitement is contagious; stick it in your backpack.' Times Metro, 4.9.99

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0192838865
• ISBN 13: 9780192838865
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208