Xenia

Goethe (left) and Schiller in Weimar. Photo: Sean Gallup / Getty Images The Public Domain Review has a little article on a bilingual selection from Xenien by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805). These Xenien, little two-line poems, originated in a sort of cheeky to-and-fro one-upmanship between Goethe and Schiller. The original collaborative work was published in Musen-Almanach in 1797. The Public Domain Review piece includes a copy of the Internet Archive edition of Paul Carus’s 1896 book, Goethe and Schiller’s Xenions* which you can page through. The book was published in Chicago by The Open Court Publishing Company of which Mr Carus was the Managing Editor. Mathilde Montpetit tells us that the Goethe and Schiller collection was “inspired by the Roman epigrammatist Martial (40–103), who ironically titled a collection of poems, directed against his enemies, after the Greek word for host-gift”. Book XIII of Martial’s Epigrams is subtitled The…