The Sorrows of Young Werther

About the book

In May 1771 Werther, a young man of about twenty-two, leaves the town for a quiet country place and writes almost daily to his friend Wilhelm: about the spring fields, the girls who come to the well for water, the children under the lindens, Homer read on a still afternoon. On the way to a country ball he meets Lotte, the magistrate’s eldest daughter, who mothers her eight brothers and sisters. She is already engaged to Albert.

The letters begin in happiness and slowly darken. Werther tries a post at a legation, cannot bear the insults of noble society, and returns to Lotte after her marriage. Ossian’s heath takes the place of Homer, and when the letters fail, an editor reports the last days in a cool, level voice. Published in 1774, the short novel in letters swept through Europe; Goethe revised it in 1787, and that is the text read today.

This complete English translation is made directly from Goethe’s German of 1787. It keeps every exclamation and broken-off sentence of Werther’s letters, sets each of the 436 paragraphs of the source as one paragraph, translates the Songs of Selma from Goethe’s own German, and adds no notes. Werther speaks to Lotte with composure until his last letter, where the German moves from Sie to du for the first time, and the English lets that distance close.