The Sorrows of Young Werther

• A new translation of the novel that made Goethe's name, the tragic account of a passionate infatuation, featuring the archetypal Romantic hero, that created a sensation on first publication.
• Translated with lyric precision and sensitivity by the award-winning author and poet, David Constantine.
• Critical introduction discusses the autobiographical background, the novel's epistolary form and structure, and the novel's reception and afterlife.
• Explanatory notes gloss contemporary allusions, literary references, and the autobiographical parallels.

Readership: Readers of classic fiction, the European novel, literature in translation, Goethe; students of German literature, the European novel, literature in translation, Romanticism, cultural studies, the epistolary novel, comparative literature.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

David Constantine is a poet, novelist, and short-story writer who taught German language and literature at Durham and then Queen's College, Oxford. His most recent poetry collection is Nine Fathoms Deep (2009), and his most recent volulme of short stories, The Shieling (2009). He has translated Hölderlin, Goethe, Kleist, and Brecht: Goethe's Faust, Part 1 and Part 2 for Penguin and Elective Affinities for Oxford World's Classics. In 2010 he won the BBC National Short Story Award. With his wife Helen he edits Modern Poetry in Translation.

"In a new translation which skilfully draws attention to elements of self-imprisonments within the novella, we come to understand Goethe's desire to exorcise a part of himself." - Kristen Treen, The Observer