Italian Journey - Appraisal

Appraisal

Et in Arcadia ego

Italian Journey initially takes the form of a diary, with events and descriptions written up apparently quite soon after they were experienced. The impression is in one sense true, since Goethe was clearly working from journals and letters he composed at the time — and by the end of the book he is openly distinguishing between his old correspondence and what he calls reporting. But there is also a strong and indeed elegant sense of fiction about the whole, a sort of composed immediacy. Goethe said in a letter that the work was "both entirely truthful and a graceful fairy-tale". It had to be something of a fairy-tale, since it was written between thirty and more than forty years after the journey, in 1816 and 1828-29.

The work begins with a famous Latin tag, Et in Arcadia ego, although originally Goethe used the German translation, Auch ich in Arkadien, which alters the meaning. The Latin phrase is usually imagined as spoken by Death — this is its sense, for example, in W. H. Auden's poem called "Et in Arcadia ego" — suggesting that every paradise is afflicted by mortality. Conversely, what Goethe's Auch ich in Arkadien says is "Even I managed to get to paradise", with the implication that we could all get there if we chose. If death is universal, the possibility of paradise might be universal too. This possibility wouldn't preclude its loss, and might even require it, or at least require that some of us should lose it. The book ends with a quotation from Ovid's Tristia, regretting his expulsion from Rome. Cum repeto noctem, Goethe writes in the middle of his own German, as well as citing a whole passage: "When I remember the night..." He is already storing up not only plentiful nostalgia and regret, but also a more complicated treasure: the certainty that he didn't merely imagine the land where others live happily ever after.