Goethetc. on the Net

I was contacted a month or so ago by Isabel del Rio, the cultural editor of a bilingual (Spanish-English) cultural magazine called Yareah. Each issue of the on- and off-line magazine focuses on a single topic. Recent issues, for instance, were devoted to James Joyce's Ulysses, the Niebelungenlied, and 1,001 Nights. The May issue was to be on Romanticism/ Romanticismo, and I was asked if one of my Goethetc. posts could be included. Actually, I have not yet posted on Goethe as a Romantic, but apparently the world considers Goethe one. The magazine's contents are drawn from websites and blogs. Besides my post on Goethe and America, another one of Yareah's pages in this issue was on The Sorrows of Young Werther ("Amor y Muerte: Goethe") by Alberto [!] Javier Maidana, an Argentinean. As Alberto writes: "La asociación de amor y muerte es una caracteristíca del romántico. Werther es romántico y como tal el amor atrae como sentimiento puro. Pero no alcanzará la armonia en el amor. El ama el amor por el amor mismo." He adds this quote from Novalis: "Todas las pasiones terminan en tragedia, todo lo que es limitado termina muriendo, toda poesía tiene algo de trágico." So have the literary Germans been Hispanicized.

There are small essays on Novalis and Hoffmann as well as on Byron and the other usual suspects in this issue, written by many young bloggers. All the bloggers (including Goethe Girl) are pictured with small thumbnail-sized photos.  One of my favorites among the contributors is the Chinese teacher pictured here, who contributed an essay to Yareah on the differences between American and European Romanticism. His name is Zhang Huaming who, judging from his biography, has never left China. More power to him.