Via I find Raymond Sokolov's On Goethe in Translation at the Best American Poetry weblog.
As he suggests:
As Sokolov notes, even Goethe's best-known works are hardly read in the English-speaking countries nowadays. The shame of it, too, is that there's so much to Goethe, beyond just the most obvious (Werther, Faust, and some of the poems) -- huge chunks of his collected works (over forty volumes and somewhere north of 50,000 pages in the Suhrkamp collected works edition ...) are first rate.
As he suggests:
Goethe in translation is a radically diminished author.And, yes, the sublime 'Über allen Gipfeln/ist Ruh' readily makes that clear.
As Sokolov notes, even Goethe's best-known works are hardly read in the English-speaking countries nowadays. The shame of it, too, is that there's so much to Goethe, beyond just the most obvious (Werther, Faust, and some of the poems) -- huge chunks of his collected works (over forty volumes and somewhere north of 50,000 pages in the Suhrkamp collected works edition ...) are first rate.