The yesterday and todays of a touchable love: Goethe's "Fifth Roman Elegy"

Abstract

In this paper, I have two purposes. First, I investigate in which way Goethe’s many ‘today’ temporalities (modernity, French Revolution, travel to Italy, rediscovery of the body) und many ‘yesterday’ temporalities (Roman Empire, latin poetry, metrical structure of the elegiac couplet, latin sculptures of the human body) oppose and/or converge in the poem “Fünfte römische Elegie” (“Fifth Roman Elegy”) from the book Römische Elegien (Roman Elegies). The poem “Fünfte römische Elegie” (offspring of the Classical or Neoclassical turn in Goethe’s oeuvre) is built on recurring oppositions (night and day, love and work, body and marble, today and antique) and seems to benefit precisely from the crossroad of multiple aesthetics and of multiple temporalities at which it was written. This particular poem represents a privileged space of analysis into how all these tensions turn into literature. My second purpose is to briefly present at the end of the paper my translation of the elegy to brazilian portuguese, which I did based on the principles of paramorphic translation such as proposed by Haroldo de Campos. To my knowledge, this is the first translation in portuguese of the “Fifth Roman Elegy” written entirely in elegiac couplet.