A Note on the Translation

This is a complete translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, made directly from the German; no earlier English version was used as its basis. The novel appeared anonymously in 1774. For the first volume of his collected writings (Göschen, 1787) Goethe revised it, reworking the end of Book One and much of Book Two, adding the story of the farmhand, and rewriting much of the editor’s report. We translate this 1787 text, the one read today, from a public-domain transcription of the Hamburg Edition.

The transcription lacks the editor’s two-paragraph preface, which has been supplied from the 1787 text. Four lines lost in transcription (in the thunderstorm at the ball, twice in Book Two, and in the Songs of Selma) and some twenty misspelled words are read as the 1787 text has them, and the Ossian letter is dated October 12, not October 10. The editor’s brief footnotes of 1787 are not in our source and have not been added.

The book has two voices. Werther writes to his friend Wilhelm almost daily, in long breathless sentences that suddenly break off; we keep his every exclamation, question, and dash, and add no feeling words of our own. The editor reports in a sober past tense, and the letters he lets in return at once to Werther’s heat.

English cannot mark the difference between Sie and du. Werther and Lotte say Sie to each other until his last letter, where he writes du for the first time; we mark the change by register alone, his words to her composed until that letter and unguarded from there on. The Ossian songs he reads to her are translated from Goethe’s own German, not taken from Macpherson.

Goethe’s divisions are headed “Preface,” “Book One,” “Book Two,” and “The Editor to the Reader.” Each of the 436 paragraphs of the source is one paragraph here, and every dated letter keeps its heading line. Names keep their German form; Lotte’s father, the Amtmann, is the magistrate. Spelling is American. There are no translator’s notes.